About

Kie Ross Zuraw is a professor in the UCLA Department of Linguistics with research interests that include computational and quantitative approaches to phonology, probabilistic grammars, and the relationship of phonological grammar to processing. Her work explores various aspects of phonology such as code-mixing and code-switching, loanword phonology and morphology, linguistic evidence from music, exceptionful linguistic patterns, and language change. She has conducted research on a diverse range of languages, including Filipino, Tagalog, Palauan, Malagasy, Javanese, Samoan, Tongan, Korean, French, and other Austronesian languages. Her scholarly contributions include studies on phonological processes in code-mixed utterances, stress in Filipino text-setting, maximum entropy constraint grammars, and the phonology of Samoan, among others. Zuraw has also examined the influence of frequency on rule application, the phonological behavior of English prefixed words, and the interaction of constraint families in languages such as Tagalog, French, and Hungarian. Her work often involves quantitative analysis, corpus studies, and the development of software tools for phonological research. She has authored numerous papers, book chapters, and conference presentations, and her research significantly advances understanding of phonological variation, language change, and the cognitive aspects of phonology.

Research topics

• Linguistics
• History
• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Social Science
• Sociology
• Psychology
• Artificial Intelligence
• Biology
• Mathematics
• Philosophy

Selected publications

• Evidence for stress in Filipino text-setting

  Phonology · 2025-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Words in Tagalog/Filipino can be either penult-prominent or ultima-prominent. Scholars have been divided on whether the language has stress, or only phonemic vowel length in penults and default phrase-final prominence. Using a corpus of Original Pilipino Music, we find that both prominent penults and prominent ultimas are set to longer notes and stronger beats, even in phrase-medial position. We further find that among pre-tonic syllables, those that would plausibly attract secondary stress are mostly set to longer notes and stronger beats. Text-setting does not faithfully reflect differences in phonetic cues between the two types of prominence, nor is it sensitive to presumed phonetic differences between high and low vowels. We conclude that songwriters’ text-setting decisions reflect phonological stress in Filipino, and that both penult-prominent and ultima-prominent words bear stress.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Evidence for stress in Filipino text-setting – ERRATUM

  Phonology · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• maxent.ot: Perform Phonological Analyses using Maximum Entropy Optimality Theory

  2024-09-23

  datasetOpen access

  Fit Maximum Entropy Optimality Theory models to data sets, generate the predictions made by such models for novel data, and compare the fit of different models using a variety of metrics. The package is described in Mayer, C., Tan, A., Zuraw, K. (in press) &lt;<a href="https://sites.socsci.uci.edu/~cjmayer/papers/cmayer_et_al_maxent_ot_accepted.pdf" target="_top">https://sites.socsci.uci.edu/~cjmayer/papers/cmayer_et_al_maxent_ot_accepted.pdf</a>&gt;.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Introducing <tt>maxent.ot</tt> : an R package for Maximum Entropy constraint grammars

  Phonological Data and Analysis · 2024-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  This paper presents maxent.ot , a package for doing phonological analysis using Maximum Entropy Optimality Theory written in the statistical programming language R. R has become the de facto standard for doing statistical analysis in linguistic research, and this package allows phonologists to create and disseminate MaxEnt OT analyses in R. A central goal of the package is to support reproducible research and to allow the crucial components of a MaxEnt analysis to be performed conveniently and with only a basic knowledge of R programming. The paper first presents a tutorial on MaxEnt constraint grammars and how to use maxent.ot to perform a simple analysis. We then turn to more advanced features of the package, including model comparison, regularization, and cross-validation.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Four inclusive practices for the phonology classroom

  Proceedings of the Annual Meetings on Phonology · 2022 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Linguistics
  • Computer Science

  This article presents four classroom practices, intended to increase inclusion and equity, that phonology teachers may find useful. The first is going beyond the simple land acknowledgement to substantively incorporate recognition of local Indigenous people(s) and language(s) into the first day of class. The second is putting languages in richer cultural, historical, and political context. The third is including author photos in class materials both to combat stereotypes and as a self-accountability tool. And the fourth practice is integrating spoken and sign languages in our teaching rather than treating sign language phonology as a separate topic (or not at all).

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Interview With Donka Minkova

  Journal of English Linguistics · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Psychology
  • History
  • Linguistics
  PublisherDOI

• Competition between whole-word and decomposed representations of English prefixed words

  Morphology · 2020 · 11 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Linguistics
  • Psychology
  • Mathematics
  PublisherDOI

• Gotta catch ’em all: Skills grading in undergraduate linguistics: Supplementary material

  Language · 2019-01-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Gotta catch 'em all: Skills grading in undergraduate linguistics

  Language · 2019-12-01 · 11 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Dissatisfied with traditional grading, we developed a grading system to directly assess whether students have mastered course material. We identified the set of skills students need to master in a course and provided multiple opportunities for students to demonstrate mastery of each skill. We describe in detail how we implemented the system for two undergraduate courses, Introductory Phonetics and Phonology I. Our goals were to decrease student stress, increase student learning and make students' study efforts more effective, increase students' metacognitive awareness, promote a growth mindset, encourage students to aim for mastery rather than partial credit, be fairer to students facing structural and institutional disadvantages, reduce our time spent on grading, and facilitate complying with new accreditation requirements. Our own reflections and student feedback indicate that many of these goals were met.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Non-native contrasts in Tongan loans

  Phonology · 2019-02-01 · 6 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  We present three case studies of marginal contrasts in Tongan loans from English, working with data from three speakers. Although Tongan lacks contrasts in stress or in CC vs. CVC sequences, secondary stress in loans is contrastive, and is sensitive to whether a vowel has a correspondent in the English source word; vowel deletion is also sensitive to whether a vowel is epenthetic as compared to the English source; and final vowel length is sensitive to whether the penultimate vowel is epenthetic, and if not, whether it corresponds to a stressed or unstressed vowel in the English source. We provide an analysis in the multilevel model of Boersma (1998) and Boersma &amp; Hamann (2009), and show that the loan patterns can be captured using only constraints that plausibly are needed for native-word phonology, including constraints that reflect perceptual strategies.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Bruce Hayes

  University of California, Los Angeles

  51 shared

• Péter Siptár

  Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics

  49 shared

• Zsuzsa Londe

  49 shared

• Isabelle Lin

  3 shared

• Robert Daland

  2 shared

• Connor Mayer

  2 shared

• Adeline Tan

  2 shared

• Sharon Peperkamp

  2 shared