Advisers: Paul Smolensky, Bill Badecker
Research Interests
I am interested in studying language as a product of the human mind/brain, and in studying the human mind/brain as the producer of language. Slightly more specifically, it seems to me that great insight can be obtained into how we learn our first languages if we can characterize at a more general level how we might learn anything at all -- how we deal with and decode our environments. And the universal specifics of languages, the types of structures that arise, and those that don't, if we can properly distill them, seem bound to tell us something about how we think, how we carve up sounds and ideas and put them together again.
The starting premise is that the learner only ultimately internalizes as categorical and phonological a small subset of the many gradient variations in acoustic input that they are exposed to. The goal then, is to be able to predict to some degree which elements will be grammaticized, and under what circumstances. The variables that influence this process seem likely to include the overall structure of the language so far learned, the particular co-occurence probabilities of various elements, and the degree of variability in production and perception, as well as potentially universal features of sound systems, perceptual systems and cognitive systems.
I am interested in developing formal accounts for how this learning mechanism might be instantiated, relying on earlier work in diachronic linguistics, evolutionary phonology and acoustic and articulatory phonetics. This theoretical account would be further supported by typological (both synchronic and diachronic) and experimental data, within the artificial grammar learning paradigm. The linking hypothesis here is that a better characterization of the learning process -- the driving force of language acquisition and language change -- will lead to a better characterization of the endpoints, or steady state outcome of that process. And this, of course, is part of the answer to the question of what structures language speakers actually have in their heads, what their mental grammars really look like.
Teaching Assistantships:
050.315 Cognitive Neuropsychology of Visual Perception
050.109 Minds, Brains and Computers
050.203 Cognitive Neuroscience: Exploring the Living Brain
050.372 Formal Methods in Cognitive Science: Neural Networks
050.326 Foundations of Cognitive Science A
050.370 Formal Methods in Cognitive Science: Language
050.101 Cognition
Graduate Courses Completed to date:
050.640 Topics in Language Processing
600.465 Introduction to Natural Language Processing
050.662 Field Methods in Linguistics (Korean)
050.670 Formal Methods in Cognitive Science: Language
050.620 Syntax I
050.641 Introduction to Phonetics
050.641 Foundations of Cognitive Science B
050.658 Language and Thought
050.826 Research Seminar in Formal Approaches to Cognitive Science
050.625 Phonology I
050.614 Classic Papers in Language Learning
550.430 Statistics
050.823 Research Seminar: Phonology
050.627 Phonology II
050.850 Department Reading Course
050.835 Seminar: Experimental and Processing Linguistics
713: Seminar in Phonology: Phonological and Phonetic Boundaries (Georgetown University)
Education:
B.S. 1997, Physics (with honors), University of Washington
B.A. 1997, Japanese, University of Washington
2003-present enrolled Johns Hopkins University
Conference Presentations:
2008 Morley, R. Integrating Sub-phonemic Cues: Learning across a morpheme boundary. Poster to be presented at Laboratory Phonology 11, Wellington, NZ.
2008 Morley, R. Bayesian Learning over Conflicting Data: Predictions for language change. Talk to be presented at SIGMORPHON 2008, Columbus, OH.
2008 Morley, R. Phonetic Detail in the grammar: Learning conditioned coarticulation patterns. Talk to be presented at the Symposium on Phonologization,
Chicago.
2007 Morley, R. Diachronic Change, The Learner and the Lexicon. Poster presented at the Fourth Annual Hopkins Workshop on Language (HOWL)
2006 Morley, R., W. Badecker, and P. Smolensky. Some limits on statistical learning. Poster presented at the Cognitive Science Society Meeting, Vancouver, Canada.
Conferences Attended:
Conference on Spatial Language and Spatial Cognition, 2003
IGERT Workshop: Cognitive Science of Language: Integrative Approaches, 2004
Cognitive Science Society Meeting, 2004, Chicago, Illinois
Boston Conference on Language Development, 2005
Language Learning Fest: Counts, Cues, Constraints, and Computation, May 2006 University of Maryland
Phonology Fest 2006, Bloomington, Indiana
Tenth Conference on Laboratory Phonology, June 2006, Paris, France
Experimental Approaches to OT, Ann Arbor, MI., 2007
LSA 2005 Summer Institute Classes:
Inductive Learning of Rules and Constraints
Language Universals and Grammatical Theory: From Generalizations to Explanation
Phonetics in Phonology
Introduction to the Phonetics and Phonology of Sign Languages
Acquiring Phonological Representations in the Mental Lexicon
Introduction to Historical Linguistics
Speech Articulation
Honors:
2004 Javits Scholarship
Manuscripts:
Morley, R. Likely Input and the Reasonable Learner. In prep.
Morley, R. Rapid Learning of Morphologically Conditioned Phonetics: vowel nasalization across a boundary. In prep.
