About

Connor Mayer is an assistant professor in the Department of Language Science at the University of California, Irvine. He earned his PhD from the Department of Linguistics at UCLA and specializes in phonology and phonetics. His research focuses on phonological and phonetic learning, as well as the structure of the phonological knowledge that speakers acquire. Mayer aims to broaden the empirical and methodological scope of phonological research to provide new insights into longstanding questions in the field. His work integrates computational and experimental approaches, with phonological theory serving as the central link between them. He utilizes computational modeling as a complement to other methodologies, employing tools such as corpus analysis, formal language theory, neural networks, Bayesian learning, maximum entropy grammars, and biomechanical modeling. On the experimental side, Mayer relies on instrumental phonetic techniques like acoustic analysis and ultrasound, behavioral experiments, and traditional elicitation methods. His current research activities are centered around three main areas: phonotactic learning, the phonetics and phonology of Uyghur (a Turkic language spoken in China), and speech motor control and biomechanics. Through these efforts, Mayer seeks to generate and test predictions that advance understanding of phonological and phonetic processes.

Research topics

• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Science
• Natural Language Processing
• Linguistics
• Philosophy
• Art
• Psychology
• Speech recognition

Selected publications

• Stress Patterns in Intra-word Code-switching

  University of Massachusetts (UMass) Amherst · 2026-03-14

  articleOpen access

  Code-switching has primarily been studied at the sentence level. More recent work, however, shows that intra-word code-switching is cross-linguistically robust and widespread, yet its phonological properties remain underexplored. As a result, a central open question is whether intra-word code-switching maintains a single phonological system or allows phonological processes from both languages to surface within a single word. To address this gap, we investigate intra-word code-switching between Kazakh and Russian, a societally-widespread but understudied language pair, focusing on stress patterns. Using experimentally-derived acoustic data, we examine whether Russian stress patterns are preserved when Russian stems are inflected with Kazakh suffixes within a Kazakh morphosyntactic frame. Our results show that Russian stress persists in inflected forms, most robustly through duration, while also exhibiting Kazakh-style final lengthening. Vowel quality analyses further reveal a Russian-style effect of stress on vowel reduction also in code-switched tokens. Overall, these findings point to hybrid stress patterns in intra-word code-switching, reflecting interaction rather than categorical dominance of a single phonological system. We analyze these patterns within a Stratal Optimality Theory framework.

  PublisherDOI

• The UCI Phonotactic Calculator: An online tool for computing phonotactic metrics

  Behavior Research Methods · 2025-07-03 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This paper presents the UCI Phonotactic Calculator (UCIPC), a new online tool for quantifying the occurrence of segments and segment sequences in a corpus. This tool has several advantages compared to existing tools: it allows users to supply their own training data, meaning it can be applied to any language for which a corpus is available; it computes a wider range of metrics than most existing tools; and it provides an accessible point-and-click interface that allows researchers with more modest technical backgrounds to take advantage of phonotactic models. After describing the metrics implemented by the calculator and how to use it, we present the results of a proof-of-concept study comparing how well different types of metrics implemented by the UCIPC predict human responses from eight published nonce word acceptability judgment studies across four different languages. These results suggest that metrics that take into account the relative position of sounds and include word boundaries are better at predicting human responses than those that are based on the absolute position of sounds and do not include word boundaries. We close by discussing the usefulness of tools like the UCIPC in experimental design and analysis and outline several areas of future research that this tool will help support.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• maxent.ot: Perform Phonological Analyses using Maximum Entropy Optimality Theory

  2024-09-23

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Fit Maximum Entropy Optimality Theory models to data sets, generate the predictions made by such models for novel data, and compare the fit of different models using a variety of metrics. The package is described in Mayer, C., Tan, A., Zuraw, K. (in press) &lt;<a href="https://sites.socsci.uci.edu/~cjmayer/papers/cmayer_et_al_maxent_ot_accepted.pdf" target="_top">https://sites.socsci.uci.edu/~cjmayer/papers/cmayer_et_al_maxent_ot_accepted.pdf</a>&gt;.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Introducing <tt>maxent.ot</tt> : an R package for Maximum Entropy constraint grammars

  Phonological Data and Analysis · 2024-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This paper presents maxent.ot , a package for doing phonological analysis using Maximum Entropy Optimality Theory written in the statistical programming language R. R has become the de facto standard for doing statistical analysis in linguistic research, and this package allows phonologists to create and disseminate MaxEnt OT analyses in R. A central goal of the package is to support reproducible research and to allow the crucial components of a MaxEnt analysis to be performed conveniently and with only a basic knowledge of R programming. The paper first presents a tutorial on MaxEnt constraint grammars and how to use maxent.ot to perform a simple analysis. We then turn to more advanced features of the package, including model comparison, regularization, and cross-validation.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Disentangling Words, Clitics, and Suffixes in Uyghur

  Languages · 2023-08-30 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access

  Turkic languages have been shown to form words using a wide range of word-formation strategies, such as suffixation, cliticization, and auxiliaries. The present paper offers a detailed description of word formation in Uyghur, compares the patterns in Uyghur with the prior literature on Turkic, offers explicit diagnostics for suffixes and clitics, and proposes a morpho-syntactic analysis for each strategy.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Issues in Uyghur phonology

  Language and Linguistics Compass · 2022-12-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This article presents an overview of several significant aspects of the phonology of Uyghur (ISO: uig; pronounced [ʊjˈʁʊr]; Turkic: China). In addition to summarising previous research, we present new data and highlight its relevance for phonological theory. The paper focuses primarily on the processes of backness harmony, rounding harmony, and vowel reduction. Particular attention is paid to the complex, and sometimes opaque, interactions between these processes, as well as the role of phonological exceptionality.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Are neutral roots in Uyghur really neutral? Evaluating a covert phonemic contrast

  Proceedings of the Annual Meetings on Phonology · 2022 · 82 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Linguistics
  • Artificial Intelligence

  This paper looks at the case of so-called neutral roots in Uyghur (Turkic: China), whose idiosyncratic behavior with respect to the backness harmony system has been analyzed as stemming from a covert vowel contrast. Based on considerations of the structural properties of the language and the results of an experimental study, we suggest that an analysis based on lexical exceptionality is more parsimonious than the traditional analysis, unifying the treatment of neutral roots with other cases of exceptionality in the harmony system and accounting for a relationship between the patterning of roots and their frequency. We close by discussing implications for covert contrast analyses in general.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Robustness of lateral tongue bracing under bite block perturbation

  Phonetica · 2022-12-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access

  Lateral tongue bracing is a lingual posture in which the sides of the tongue are held against the palate and upper molars, and has been observed cross-linguistically. However, it is unknown whether lateral bracing makes adjustments to external perturbation like other body postures. The present study aims to test the robustness of lateral tongue bracing with three experiments. The first baseline experiment was an analysis of an electropalatogram database and the results showed lateral bracing being continuously maintained. The second experiment applied an external perturbation during speech production. A bite block was held between participants' teeth while intra-oral video was used to record contact between the sides of the tongue and upper molars during speech. The results indicated that lateral bracing was maintained most of the time during speech. The third experiment included simulations investigating the activation of tongue muscles relevant to lateral bracing at different degrees of jaw opening. The results show that bracing requires higher activation of bracing agonists and lower activation of bracing antagonists as jaw opening increases. Our results suggest that lateral tongue bracing is actively maintained and robust under external perturbation and further indicate it serves as an essential lingual posture during speech production.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Biomechanical simulation of lip compression and spreading

  Canadian acoustics · 2021-08-17

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Researchers have proposed that human movements exploit regions of biomechanical stability, allowing targets to be reliably achieved in the face of noisy, everyday conditions (e.g., Loeb 2012). Previous biomechanical simulation studies have demonstrated that this property holds for various speech postures of the lips (Stavness et al. 2013; Gick et al. 2020). These studies, however, have omitted two cross-linguistically common lip postures: compression, where the aperture between the lips is narrowed without accompanying protrusion (e.g., Catford 1982), and spreading, where the corners of the lips are drawn back. Previous empirical work has met with difficulty in quantifying the muscle activations that generate these postures due to the interdigitation of lip muscles (Blair and Smith 1986). The present study presents biomechanical simulation results using the Artisynth platform, which allows movements of the face and vocal tract to be simulated as a function of muscle activation (Lloyd et al. 2012). These simulations identify muscle groupings sufficient to produce lip compression and spreading, and provide insight into which of these groupings generate the quantal properties observed in other lip postures. The results complement past experimental findings, and provide a starting point for future modeling and experimentation.

  Publisher

• Issues in Uyghur backness harmony: Corpus, experimental, and computational studies

  eScholarship (California Digital Library) · 2021-01-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This dissertation investigates backness harmony in Uyghur (Turkic: China) from a variety of methodological and analytical perspectives. Backness harmony is a phenomenon where suffix forms must agree in backness with the roots to which they are attached. This dissertation demonstrates that the harmony system in Uyghur consists of a productive phonological core with many lexicalized components that have emerged as the result of sound change and extensive borrowing. That is, backness harmony in Uyghur has many of the properties of an inflectional class system with strong phonological correlates, rather than a purely phonological phenomenon. I explore the implications of this observation for theories of phonological opacity, phonetic biases in phonological learning, and the mathematical complexity of phonological patterns.\nThe first part of the dissertation presents corpus and experimental studies that investigate the role lexicalization plays in the backness harmony system. Chapter 3 looks at an opaque interaction between backness harmony and an independent process of vowel reduction. A large scale corpus study reveals that this opacity is of a type hitherto unattested, exhibiting gradient rates of opacity that are correlated with root frequency. I argue that this behavior is not predicted by standard theories that treat opacity as an ordering relationship between two phonological processes, and is best analyzed as a parallel interaction between general phonological markedness constraints on harmony and lexically-indexed constraints that specify the harmonic class of a root. Chapter 4 presents the results of an experiment that examines how Uyghur speakers generalize backness harmony to novel roots. Responses display sensitivities to the phonetic properties of backness harmony that are not evident in attested forms. I suggest that this discrepancy between attested and novel words can be explained by phonetically-driven learning biases whose effect is obscured by lexical listing of the harmonizing class of attested roots, but which become evident in novel roots for which no such listing exists. Finally, Chapter 5 is a phonetic study that evaluates whether roots with no harmonizing segments display evidence of a covert backness contrast in their vowels that drives their harmonizing behavior, as previously suggested in the literature. Although evidence of coarticulatory effects from neighboring segments is found, there is no correlation between vowel backness and harmonizing behavior. This again supports an analysis where the harmonizing behavior of these roots is lexically specified, rather than phonologically determined.\n\nThe second part of the dissertation, Chapters 6 and 7, look at Uyghur backness harmony from the perspective of formal language theory. Previous work suggests that patterns in segmental phonology tend to occupy a particular region of the subregular hierarchy (that is, they can be generated by mathematical models which are less powerful than finite-state automata). More complex patterns have been shown to pose learnability problems in artificial grammar learning studies. Chapter 6 demonstrates that Uyghur backness harmony exceeds an upper bound of complexity that has been proposed for segmental patterns. Chapter 7 presents a probabilistic extension of a language class commonly applied to phonological patterns, which is used to model the novel root data from Chapter 4. This model is used to test the hypothesis that the discrepancy between wug and corpus patterns presented in Chapter 4 results from a bias towards computationally simpler patterns. It is demonstrated that the productive pattern learned by speakers is not computationally simpler than the pattern found in attested words, presenting evidence against claims of learning biases towards computationally simpler patterns.

  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• Bryan Gick

  15 shared

• Travis Major

  University of Southern California

  4 shared

• D. H. Whalen

  City University of New York

  4 shared

• Ian Stavness

  3 shared

• Tamra Weigel

  University of British Columbia

  3 shared

• Kie Zuraw

  2 shared

• François Roewer-Després

  2 shared

• Chenhao Chiu

  National Taiwan University

  2 shared

Education

• Ph.D.

  Department of Linguistics at UCLA