Lab Members

Dr. Anne-Michelle Tessier

Lab Director

Anne-Michelle (Ph.D. 2007, UMass Amherst) is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at UBC. She is a phonologist specializing in acquisition, constraint-based grammars, learning algorithms, and child L1 and L2 production.  She previously held faculty and researcher appointments at the University of Alberta, SFU and the Center for Human Growth and Development (UMichigan). In 2015, she published a textbook “Phonological Acquisition: Child Language and Constraint-Based Grammar” (Palgrave Macmillan). Her current projects focus on modeling French liaison, in both developing and end-state grammars (with Karen Jesney, Marie-Eve Bouchard and others); the perception and acceptability of English onset cluster repairs, among L1 child and L2 adult listeners (with Claire Moore-Cantwell and others); and the acquisition of complex, interacting phonological patterns including Canadian Raising (with Ashley Farris-Trimble).

Photo Credit: J. Craft

Howard

Howard (Basic Obedience, 2019), has been interested in language acquisition as long as he can remember, and is particularly focused on inter-species communicative development. His research emphasizes the role of IDS and extreme pitch excursions as a function of speaker, context and treat value, and the importance of head tilt, trying not to jump, and extreme tail wagging in discourse. He is also a very good boy.

Bagel

Bagel (Puppy Training Diploma, 2022) has joined our lab from a Washington state group, where she focused primarily on licking things and romping. Her current interests include gently chewing socks and throwing herself at senior canine lab member Howard, but she is beginning to focus more on issues of language comprehension, lexical development, as well as loving blueberries. She is a very good girl. 

Alex Ayala

Graduate student

Alex is PhD Student of Linguistics at the University of British Columbia. She studies morphophonology and mathematical models of learnability. She is curious about how we form words and the ways in which we use abstract categories to learn that words are related through form-meaning mappings. Specifically, her projects include relational puzzles like paradigm gaps, and categorisation puzzles like sub-morphemic expressions of morphosyntactic features. She enjoys photography, playing video games, and pretending that she is being chased by zombies when she runs.

Kaili Vesik

Graduate student

Kaili is a PhD candidate in the Linguistics Department at UBC. Her linguistic interests involve phonology, vowel harmony, music, Estonian, learning algorithms, and building computational tools to support theoretical research. Her current research focuses on algorithmic learning of phonology in Balto-Finnic languages. Outside of academia, you’ll most likely find Kaili singing, sewing, hiking, running, or skiing.

Sijia Zhang

Graduate Student

Sijia is a PhD student in the Department of Linguistics at UBC. Her research focuses on second language (L2) acquisition of phonology and formal modeling of L2 phonology. Her current project looks into how L1 Mandarin-speaking adults with different amounts of L2 English experiences perceive English low-vowel + nasal sequences. She is also interested in the fields of prosody and speech perception through experimental approaches and fieldwork, including Mandarin speech segmentation and tone sandhi, as well as Ktunaxa focus prosody. Outside of linguistics, you may find her running, playing basketball, or playing the piano.

Zara Khalaji Pirbaluti

Graduate Student

Zara is an MA student of Linguistics at UBC with interests in exploring the experimental and formal sides of linguistics in the context of acquisition and learning. Her research focuses on questions concerning learnability in morpho-phonological alternations and any exceptions therein, as well as investigating whether speakers exhibit biases in learning which go against the ambient language and their linguistic experience, among other things. In her free time, she likes to learn languages, musical theory, coding, and statistics in addition to getting lost in random rabbit holes in the depths of Wikipedia.

Yoann Léveillé

Graduate Student | Webmaster

[jo(w)an levɛje]

Leah Brown

Akie Leesmith

Akie /əˈki/ is a fourth-year Linguistics major with a French minor. She is particularly interested in French linguistics and sociolinguistics, and is excited to work on this lab’s French liaison project. She loves to chit and to chat, and spends much of her free time watching movies (to rate on letterboxd), playing New York Times games, and making earrings.

Danielle Lefebvre

Danielle (BA Major in Speech Sciences, Minor in Psychology, 2023) has worked on various aspects of the lab’s projects on the acquisition of French liaison, and has also served as our webmaster; she is currently helping to develop an online study on liaison adjectives. Her linguistic interests also include the influence of multilingualism on child language acquisition. Outside of linguistics, Danielle enjoys testing chocolate chip cookie recipes and pretending she will eventually read all the books on her bookshelf.

Christine Liu

Christine is currently a third year undergraduate student at UBC majoring in Speech Sciences and minoring in Psychology. She is planning to pursue her M.Sc. degree in speech-language pathology after she graduates. Her linguistic interest is in child language acquisition and her language background includes English, Cantonese, and some French. She’s currently involved with a research study focusing on child-directed speech in Cantonese. Outside of Linguistics and Psychology, Christine enjoys playing tennis and hiking outdoors.