Welcome!

I'm a phonologist who works on questions of linguistic theory using computational and experimental methods. I'm currently an Assistant Professor in the Linguistics Department at the University of Southern California, and a co-director of the Center for Computational Language Sciences at USC.

In Fall 2026, I will be joining the faculty of the University of Chicago as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics. I direct the Breiss Lab.

Prior to this, I worked in the Computational Psycholinguistics Lab in the Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences at MIT, supervised by Roger Levy, and affiliated with the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab. I completed my PhD in 2021 under the supervision of Bruce Hayes in the Linguistics Department at UCLA.

cbreiss@usc.edu · Google Scholar · CV · Breiss Lab

Research

My research is in theoretical, computational, and experimental phonology, with particular interest in learning/acquisition, the representation of overlapping and interacting phonological processes, and phonology's interfaces with (morpho)syntax and the lexicon. I've become fond of calling this line of research "computational psychophonology".^*Also known as "psychocomputational phonology".

Methodologically, I make use of whatever tools are needed for the job: right now, this means computational modeling (Bayesian, neural, or otherwise), corpus methods, online surveys of understudied languages, and laboratory experiments of all types.

Teaching

I teach in the USC Linguistics Department. I'm currently teaching the following courses:

LING 301: Introduction to Phonology and Morphology (Spring 2026)
LING 531b: Graduate Phonology II (Spring 2026)

See my CV for a full teaching history.