Fred Mailhot
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History
- Blog
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- Member for
- 4 years 32 weeks
My Profile
- Title
- Mr.
- Occupation
- Researcher: PhD
- Discipline(s)
- Computational (neuro)phonology
- University
- Carleton University
- Department
- Institute for Cognitive Science - ICS
- Country
- Canada
- Town / City
- Ottawa
- Previous Universities
- Concordia University, McGill University
- RESEARCH INTERESTS
- computational phonology, phonetics, neuroscience, computational modeling
Research
- Member for
- 4 years 32 weeks
"Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing."
-- Wernher von Braun3rd year PhD in Carleton University's Cognitive Science department. I arrived with 1.85 undergrad degrees (Linguistics &
Computer Science, resp.) and an MA in something vaguely
interdisciplinary and language-related (although the thesis was pure syntax).As a linguist, I'm interested in how best to account for regular and
productive morphophonological alternations---especially vowel harmony, which I think is a fantastic microcosm for testing out (morpho)phonological theories. As a
(budding) computational neuroscientist, I am interested in
(i) figuring out whether brains can do the things we (linguists) insist they must, and (ii) constructing biologically plausible neural models of linguistic processes. My research brings these interests together,
investigating the feasibility of establishing relations (aka "bridge
laws" or "linking hypotheses") between what neuroscientists believe about how brains compute and
what linguists agree are necessary properties of phonological
representations and processes (given the existence of productive
phenomena like vowel harmony). I suspect that probability theory is the right mathematical tool to couch all of this in (but I definitely *don't* think probabilities have any business in formal models of grammatical knowledge).