Welcome! I am a fifth-year graduate student in the Department of Linguistics at UCLA. I study how a speaker’s knowledge of the sound patterns of their language is structured and represented in the mind, and also the ways in which speakers use that knowledge across different linguistic functions. I combine a range of computational, experimental, and elicitation-based approaches in my research with the common goal of characterizing the structure and psycholinguistic nature of phonological knowledge.
I’m currently working on my dissertation, co-advised by Tim Hunter and Claire Moore-Cantwell. Other members of my committee are Bruce Hayes, Megha Sundara, and Canaan Breiss. My dissertation explores how accumulating phonotactic violations affect probability and acceptability in the predictions of maximum entropy grammars, in the lexicon of languages, and in artificial grammar learning experiments.
I also investigate the role of abstract phonological knowledge in non-native speech perception. And, I work on the phonology of Paraguayan Guarani, specifically on its leftward and rightward nasalization systems and its interactions with morphological structure and the lexicon. I’m a member of the UCLA Phonology Lab and the UCLA Language Acquisition Lab, where I collaborate with members and mentor undergraduates in linguistic research.
isacabrera at ucla dot edu
cv
You can find my CV here.