Areas of study
Linguistics
My work in linguistics includes theoretical work on natural language syntax and semantics, in particular of English and Hindi-Urdu, as well as experimental and corpus work on child language development and the relationship between first- and second-language development and education.
Higher education
As an Institutional Research analyst, I work on a number of topics related in particular to undergraduate student success, equity in student experiences, the relationship between off-campus work and student success, and effective student services in distance/online education.
Audiology
I also have experience with experimental and qualitative studies of hearing, speech perception, and hearing loss. This includes work testing the effectiveness of consumer hearing devices, the relationship between mobility, hearing loss, and speech perception, and subjective experiences of hearing and listening in complex environments.
Methodologies
Statistical analysis
I have a large amount of experience using R for statistics, using methods such as linear models, mixed-effect models, and ordinal models (e.g. cumulative link models).
Survey design
I have designed and analyzed surveys via web forms (e.g. Qualtrics and Survey Monkey) as well as for individual interviews and focus groups.
Theoretical analysis
My experience in linguistics includes a large amount of formal theoretical work, based primarily in the frameworks of Minimalism and Optimality Theory.
The Form and Acquisition of Free Relatives
Clauss (2017). My UMass dissertation.
I examine the properties of Free Relative constructions (‘Charles read what Sebastian wrote‘) in English and cross linguistically.
I look at data from child and adult language, and build a theory of the syntax of FRs that accounts for properties of the adult language, cross-linguistic variation, and children’s acquisition path.
Listening in 2020
Helfer, Mamo, Clauss, and Tellerico (2020). Published in the American Journal of Audiology.
An analysis of survey data on younger and older adult populations, examining the how experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic affected self-assessed measures of hearing effort and difficulty.
Syntactic cues alone in adjective learning
Clauss and Hartman (2015). Presentation slides from the BU Conference on Language Development.
We examine a novel word-learning experiment aimed at investigating children and adults’ ability to learn complex properties of adjectives by exposure to new words in multiple frames. We are specifically interested in “tough” type adjectives and the multiple constructions they appear in (”Cats are easy to pet’ vs. ‘It’s easy to pet cats’)