GREENWOOD SUCCESSFULLY DEFENDS DISSERTATION

Last Friday (June 3), Anna Greenwood successfully defended her dissertation, “An experimental investigation of phonetic naturalness.” Anna’s work addresses the important question of how and why phonological typology reflects phonetic naturalness, and more specifically, why artificial grammar experiments that test for learning biases in favor of natural patterns so often fail to find them. Anna’s hypothesis (following other recent work) is that naturalness in typology is caused by perception and production acting as filters on what we grammaticize. Her artificial grammar experiments recreate in the lab the hypothesized conditions in the wild by manipulating the production (and therefore the perception) of stimuli, and her results support the hypothesis that naturalness comes from constraints on performance. Many who were present at the defense followed Anna to an after-party, where she was toasted and cheered. We are happy to see Dr. Greenwood move ahead, but we will also miss her.