Sarah Brogden Payne

[sɛɹə bɹɒgdən peɪn] (they/she)

Hi! I'm a PhD candidate in Linguistics and an IACS and NSF GRFP fellow at Stony Brook University (entered 2022), co-advised by Jordan Kodner and Jeff Heinz. My research investigates the cognitive mechanisms underlying child language acquisition by developing mechanistic computational models and novel evaluation strategies to probe the cognitive plausibility of such models. I focus mainly on morphological, phonological, and morphophonological phenomena, and use experimental evidence regarding acquisition errors to motivate both the cognitive mechanisms I hypothesize and implement and the evaluations I design. My dissertation proposes Distributional Uniformity, a novel evaluation approach for computational models of acquisition which compares their error distributions to those made by children.

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 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!