Sarah Brogden Payne

[sɛɹə bɹɒgdən pɛjn] (they/she)

Hi! I'm a PhD student in Linguistics and an IACS and NSF GRFP fellow at Stony Brook University (entered 2022), co-advised by Dr. Jordan Kodner and Dr. Jeff Heinz. My research interests are in language acquisition and computational linguistics, with a particular focus on morphological, phonological, and morphophonological phenomena. The primary goal of my work is to develop algorithmic accounts of how children learn their native language, drawing both on experimental findings and formal results from computational learning theory.

Before Stony Brook, I received a B.A. in Linguistics and Computer Science with a minor in Cognitive Science from the University of Pennsylvania in May 2022. At Penn, I worked primarily with Dr. Charles Yang. My bachelor's thesis, When Collisions are a Good Thing: the Acquisition of Morphological Marking, investigated how children learn which morphosyntactic features are marked in their language.

I'm originally from Bloomington, Indiana, but also grew up in the UK, mainly near Ipswich, Suffolk. I have both British t-glottalization and American flapping, so my /t/'s are a mess!