Dr. John Alderete

Associate Professor

SFU

Linguistics

Research Themes: 

Evolving Language in an Information Economy, Language, Sustainability and Transnationalism, The Communicating Mind and Body

Dr. Alderete uses methods from psycholinguistics, linguistic theory, and traditional fieldwork to examine how complex linguistic systems are learned and used in natural speech.

Dr. Alderete completed his Ph.D. dissertation on the morphological influences on stress and pitch accent systems. He was an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellow at University of British Columbia and NIH Postdoctoral Research Associate at Rutgers University Center for Cognitive Science, where he developed expertise in formal learning theory and primary linguistic description of Athabaskan languages. His main areas of research are phonology, morphology, and their interaction, as well as computational learning algorithms, Optimality Theory, and linguistic documentation of Tahltan, a critically endangered language of Northwestern British Columbia.

Research Interests

Phonetics and phonology, morphology, First Nations Languages, computational linguistics and cognitive science