About me
About me
Hi! I’m Darby and I’m a third-year PhD student in linguistics at the University of Southern California.
My reserach interests are primarily in phonology, phonetics, and experimental/lab phonology. I’m advised by Louis Goldstein and Stephanie Shih, and I’m especially interested in prosodic systems and what leads to exceptions in regular prosodic patterns. I’m also interested in affixation, particularly the asymmetry between prefixes and suffixes, both typologically, and in the exceptional phonological behavior of prefixes.
I’m originally from Michigan, and received a BA and MA from Michigan State University. For my MA, I studied phonotactic acceptability judgments using methods from speech perception and was advised by Karthik Durvasula.
CV
Education
University of Southern California - August 2021 - Present
Ph.D. in Linguistics
Michigan State University - August 2019 - Spring 2021
M.A. in Linguistics
Thesis: Understanding Acceptability Judgements: Grammatical Knowledge vs. Lexical Search
Advisor: Dr. Karthik Durvasula
Michigan State University - August 2016 - May 2019
B.A. in Linguistics
Second degree in Japanese
Minor in TESOL
Lansing Community College - August 2013 - May 2016
Japanese Major - Transferred 54 credits to MSU
Teaching and Research Experience
USC LING 210 (Intro to Linguistics)
Teaching Assistant
Aug 2023 - Present
USC LING 115 (Language and Society)
Teaching Assistant
Aug 2022 - May 2023
MSU LIN 230 (Languages of the World)
Graduate Instructor
June 2020 - August 2020
MSU Child Language Acquisition Lab
Graduate Research Assistant
August 2019 - June 2020
Conferences
Morris Halle @ 100
September 2023
University Undergraduate Research and Arts Forum (UURAF)
April 2019
Michigan State Undergraduate Linguistics Conference (MSULC)
April 2019
Great Lakes Expo for Experimental and Formal Undergraduate Linguistics (GLEEFUL)
April 2019
Lab Groups
USC Phonetics and Phonology Group (co-organizer)
Languages
English - native
Japanese - intermediate
Contact me
Address:
3601 Watt Way
Grace Ford Salvatori 340
Los Angeles, CA 90089
Email:
grachek[at]usc[dot]edu