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Grant McGuire Joins the UCSC Linguistics Department

April 26, 2009

We are pleased to announce that Grant McGuire will join the department as a permanent member of the faculty in 2009. McGuire is an experimental phonetician trained at the Ohio State University and at Berkeley. His current work centers on the question of how learners of a human language can take the gradient, continuous, and variable flow of acoustic data that comes at them in the speech stream and construct from it a sequence of discrete categorical entities (segments, syllables and the like). His work focuses especially on the acoustic cues used by speakers of different languages to construct these abstract categories and how the processes that build a categorial phonology from a variable phonetics relate to other kinds of categorization currently under study in psychology and cognitive science.

Grant's appointment strengthens the already flourishing environment for laboratory phonology and phonetics in the department and should take the department into new intellectual territory as the research infrastructure for acoustic and articulatory phonetics is developed under his stewardship.