Department Member, Wolfson College
University College London, Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging
Thesis Title: A Computational Phonology and Morphology of Hawaiian
|
John Coleman
|
About
My unifying interest as a linguist and neuroscientist is to combine the methodologies of computational modelling and experimentation in order to understand the amazing complexity of ordinary human language, both in healthy and in recovering populations.
In my doctoral thesis, I applied a spectrum of techniques from (statistical) natural language processing to the phonology and morphology of Hawaiian, an endangered Eastern Polynesian language spoken across the islands of Hawai‘i (and, incidentally, also one of my native languages). The resulting models make predictions about the optimal patterns of stress assignment, reduplication, and passivization (amongst other things), which can now be tested experimentally against behaviour and used to produce materials in support of language recovery. I couldn't imagine a better thesis supervisor than John Coleman.
During my postgraduate training, I was also extraordinarily fortunate to work with Joe Devlin on the cognitive neuroscience of language. Since completing my thesis, I have continued to develop this exciting line of research with Cathy Price and David Green at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, at UCL. Our current project aims to understand (1) how multiple languages are represented and accessed in the bilingual brain, and (2) how bilingual aphasiacs recover the ability to speak in each language after brain damage due to cancer or stroke. To these ends, we employ a variety of computational and experimental techniques, such as anatomical and functional neuroimaging and dynamic causal (i.e. network) modelling.
Contact Information
| Homepage: |
