Linnaea Stockall

OASIS: Hi Dr. Stockall, thanks for speaking with us. How do you fit and not fit into the discipline you got your degree in? ‍

LS: For a long time this was a bit of a struggle - I got my PhD in formal linguistics, where I just happened to use the tools of cognitive neuroscience to address fundamental formal linguistics questions. Everything (the cohort, the preparation, etc.) was formal linguistics. I didn't have any sort of training in cognitive psychology. But I went and did a couple of postdocs at Michigan State and Concordia. Those four years were like a second PhD that let me talk to psychologists, learn how they think, grapple with the literature. Then I came back to linguistics. I think it's the right place. I sometimes feel a little lonely as a psychologist in a linguistics department but it's better than the other way around. I take the neurobio and psychophysics seriously, but the research questions I'm interested in are still formal questions, taking ontology, architecture, formal claims seriously as claims about psychological knowledge, generating formal representations. It would be really difficult to do that work in a psych department where the assumptions about what it is that you know are very different. In the end I've found my place, but it was a journey, and involved basically a second PhD. 

OASIS: That's a nice trajectory for students for students to hear about.

LS: Yeah, I talk to my students a lot about how to navigate these two worlds - between two fundamentally different approaches. In some ways it's a constant uphill battle, how to get published for instance? I fit but only with a home in a linguistics department. 

OASIS: What else would you like to tell students or early-career researchers? 

LS: Anywhere where PhD research is project-led, my first piece of advice is to be broad in your interests, your relationships, embrace your field and adjacent fields, go to meetings and talks and have conversations with people who aren't obviously perfect matches for what you do. You'll often get way more out of that than going to the obvious talks. 

Build relationships with your peers, your seniors, people coming along behind you. Figure out how to be a mentor to the latter. The only way to have a career is to have relationships with people. I still collaborate regularly with people I met when we were students or postdocs together, more than 20 years later. 

Ask for help and advice. I felt like it was an admission of weakness to ask for help. I didn't understand that people are delighted to offer help and advice. I would have saved myself a lot of trouble if I had done that. This is one of the most important things I've learned over my career, instead of having to be self-sufficient and prove I know everything.

Do not under any circumstances accept exploitative work conditions. The culture of academia is heavily skewed toward "shut up and work more than the next person" to prove you're worthy. It's not acceptable, it's immoral. Don't accept short-term exploitative contracts that pay nothing just to stay in the field. 

You have to have a plan B. You do make sacrifices to pursue plan A but you should have a plan B so that you are not kept in poverty and insecure work conditions for years. It’s not worth it. You might be much better off if you go make money doing something else, and then come back to linguistics research as your retirement plan, when you can pursue it for fun.  

OASIS: What's the story of how you came to be interested in the topic you'll be talking about at OASIS? 

In some sense I'm still working on things I worked on as a PhD student - do people detect morphemes in complex words in real time at all, are morphemes a thing in processing? That was a big debate in the late 90s, and some people still aren’t convinced. In my postdoc work I got involved in some sentence processing work, with Matt Husband, on the processing of events and in particular how we generate event schema representations. The rest of my career has more or less been about bringing these two ends together. 

This is where people come in. In my second postdoc I shared an office with Christina Manouilidou and she had just finished a PhD on morphological processing in Greek looking at restrictions on morphological wellformedness in Greek derived verbs. She had developed this paradigm that was aimed at a more interesting question of interpretation rather than just detecting morphemes. Then when I was teaching at Hampshire College and collaborating with people at UMass, I did a project with Denis Drieghe, Sandy Pollatsek and Roberto de Almeida looking at structurally ambiguous words like unlockable, to see how quickly people commit to an interpretation. 

So those are the ingredients of everything I've been working on since, largely in collaboration with Christina - once you've detected component pieces in a complex string, what do we do with them? How do we get from morphophonology to syntax and semantics? How do we do that in real time? Over the last 6 years the focus has been comparative cross-linguistic work, implementing as close as possible to the same psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics protocol across a range of typologically different languages, trying to understand what is universal across all languages, and what is specific to individual languages. And that's what I'll be talking about at OASIS. 

Just to highlight that research is about the ingredients of thought but it's also about people - none of this would have been possible without them, Christina and others now in these projects. 

OASIS: Finish this sentence: In another life I would be… 

LS: ...an archeologist! a bioarcheologist, doing DNA and isotopic analysis to figure out what someone's last meal was. 

My pandemic podcast journey started with the history of Rome, Egypt, etc,  and then pivoted into prehistory, the last few years it has been really exciting with new methodologies to learn about the Neanderthals and Densiovans and so on. I think I’d have loved to spend my career in some combination of poking around in the dirt and in a lab doing lab-based analysis and making incredible discoveries. 

OASIS:  How old were you when you discovered linguistics?

LS: Already my third or fourth year of university. I really should have already graduated. I was trying to find something that interested me, and I took an intro course and it was a revelation that you could study this. It still blows my mind. The key moment was in a year-long class. The last math class I'd taken was 10 years previously! I had been thinking that I didn't have the brain to do analytic work. That first semester of intro linguistics I just couldn't get it. I didn't understand what the hell a phonology problem was. I was enjoying myself but it was such a struggle. Then at some point, it just clicked, I don't know what it was, but it clicked that it was math, it was solving an equation, but without numbers. Oh! Why didn't someone tell me that you could do math without numbers? I can't remember phone numbers, if I add I use fingers and toes. But once I figured out you could do math without numbers, I was hooked. These days I do stats, not many lambda-expressions anymore, but I do think algebraically, mapping X to Y in the context of Z. So the question I'm interested in is how does the wetware do this - linguistics as mathematical modeling of a biological system. 

OASIS: Thanks for your answers, we will see you in Lisbon! 

LS: You're very welcome.