Márton Sóskuthy

I'm an Associate Professor in Phonetics and Cognitive Systems in the Department of Linguistics at the University of British Columbia, and the director of the OoPS-Lab (Origins of Patterns in Speech Lab).

My research focuses mainly on the emergence and maintenance of systematic patterns in speech, where patterns are understood in a broad sense. They include not only conventional phonological and morphological patterns, but also: relationships between communicative function / language use / meaning on the one hand and the shapes of words on the other; orderly configurations in sound systems; and recurring patterns of change across languages.

While many such patterns are well-established in the literature, I'm particularly interested in how they come to be and how they persist over decades, centuries and millenia. For instance, all languages appear to show a pattern whereby frequent words are shorter than infrequent ones. How does such a pattern emerge? Do frequent words erode away at a faster rate than infrequent ones? Or is it that shorter word forms shift their use so that they end up in more frequent functions? Perhaps both?

I approach these questions using a combination of cross-linguistic and diachronic data. As the questions I'm interested in are often methodologically complex and challenging, much of my work involves computational modelling and statistical analysis, and I maintain an active research profile in applied statistics, particularly in the modelling of non-linear trajectories. I am also a firm believer in open and transparent science, and most of the data that I have worked with is available through my GitHub and OSF profiles.