JAMES MYERS

Graduate Institute of Linguistics
National Chung Cheng University
Min-Hsiung, Chia-Yi 621301
Taiwan
Lngmyers at ccu dot edu dot tw



Teaching

I teach phonology, psycholinguistics, statistics, empirical methods, morphology, cognitive science (cotaught with faculty in psychology and philosophy), and other weird things.


Research

My research program looks coherent to me anyway: it's all about trying to figure out the relationship between mental grammar and rote memory - a task that has led me in recent years into methodological questions. I mainly do phonology and morphology with a psycholinguistic edge, and have recently worked mainly on Chinese.

Web resources

Research works

Several of the PDFs below contain Chinese fonts, which may choke ordinary versions of Acrobat Reader. Email me if you fail to get a paper you want.

NOTE: If some papers don't open automatically when you click on the links, you can still save them directly to your computer and open them from there.

You can use the following menus to restrict display to certain types of works (e.g., only journal articles on the processing of Mandarin morphology). Click CHOOSE to choose. Click RESET to display everything again.


Biography

I was born in California but left before developing a phoneme inventory. I grew up in Shorewood, Wisconsin (on the fringes of Milwaukee), and got a BA in mathematics at Carleton College (Minnesota) in 1988. While still there I realized I was only a pretend mathematician, so the math department let me do my senior project on formal language theory. Meanwhile I was taking classes from Mike Flynn, who had just come from a job in the University of Arizona Linguistics Department. And that's where I ended up getting my PhD in 1993, with Mike Hammond (whose previous job had been in Milwaukee) as my thesis director. Of course, while in Arizona I realized I was only a pretend linguist too, so even though my thesis was nominally about phonological theory, it also had a lot of speech errors, experiments and other psycholinguistic mumbo-jumbo in it. My first job was back in the Rust Belt, as a shamefully lackadaisical postdoc in an NIH training grant with the "Spoken Language Group" (mainly psychologists) at SUNY-Buffalo (1993-1995). There I did stuff (see above) with Paul Luce (whose actual homepage is apparently top-secret) and the late great Peter Jusczyk, meanwhile coming to realize that I was, of course, only a pretend psychologist. My next job was one semester at York University in Toronto, teaching intro phonology and doing stuff (see above) with sociolinguist Greg Guy, and then I lucked onto a calendar-year job at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, teaching intro phonology and psycholinguistics (1996).

Eventually, after all of these wanderings, I came to realize that I was only a pretend American, so I fled the country to my current job at National Chung Cheng University in Taiwan, where I've been since 1997. They made me a full professor a while back (the main benefit so far is I have to go to more meetings). Fortunately my banishment coincided with the rise of the Web, so I still stay in active contact with folks in exotic countries, in particular Bruce Derwing and Gary Libben, both at the University of Alberta at Edmonton, with whom I've done some stuff (see above), and along with whom I play a small role on the editorial board of the new journal The Mental Lexicon.

Taiwan is, of course, The Renegade Province That China Vows to Reunite With The Mainland, By Force If Necessary. It is no longer the paradise of cheap pirated crap (that's China). Also, "Taiwan" is not synonymous with "Taipei," which is over a three-hour train ride (90 minutes by high-speed rail) from Chiayi county where I live, which is near the Tropic of Cancer, where the weather is somewhat better (though the earthquakes are worse, and ironically so is the air, since the rich Taipei factory owners put all their factories down here). My life here's pretty good, though my Chinese still sucks (scientists have proven that after five years of immersion in an L2 environment, you're basically screwed). Taiwan is a veritable cornucopia for (psycho)linguistics, since there are so many languages here; so far I've done stuff on Mandarin, Southern Min (Taiwanese), Taiwan Sign Language, and a tiny smattering on Formosan (Austronesian) languages.


Last updated on July 6, 2022