Zachary M. N. McCormick
(he/him/his)
My Research/Academic Interests
Fancy seeing you here! My name is Zach(ary) McCormick, and I am a second-year PhD student in the Cognitive Science program at Johns Hopkins University, advised by Dr. Margaret E. L. Renwick. I study how listeners turn a noisy, fleeting speech signal into abstract linguistic structure in real time. My work centers on phonological inference: how the mind and brain can recover phonemic and prosodic structure from input that is variable, ambiguous, and often incomplete. I approach this through probabilistic models of cognition, treating perception as inference over phonological categories, which may themselves be graded rather than strictly discrete, as listeners weigh incoming cues against their knowledge of the sound system to resolve uncertainty in real time.
Increasingly (and especially as of late), I am asking how this inference extends "beyond the ear." Speech is seen as well as heard, and visual information from a speaker's face and body bears on segments and prosody. Probabilistic frameworks offer a principled account of how listeners integrate these streams, weighting each by its reliability. Audiovisual speech perception also provides an interesting test of the nature of phonological representations, asking whether or not they are tied to a single modality.
By combining theoretical phonology, computational and statistical modeling, behavioral methods, and neuroimaging, I aim to contribute to the growing literature on building an account of speech processing, one that explains how abstract linguistic structure is grounded in perceptual and neural systems and how that architecture meets the demands of real-time comprehension.
Fun Addenda
I'm also a lover of film/cinema, transcribing music (and IPA transcriptions as well, of course), language learning (duh), travel, tennis, bowling, avoiding concision like the plague in all ways, and overusing phrases like "in all ways" :)
My Academic Path
My (postsecondary) academic path began at Purdue University (2021-2023), where I triple-majored in linguistics, Spanish, and Italian studies. My focus was largely on the P-side of linguistics, with special attention to Spanish-English bilingualism, Spanish phonetics, and the phonological patterns that emerge in contact settings. During this time, I gained early exposure to computational linguistics, though my interests remained grounded in human cognition and language use.
At Brandeis University (2023-2025), where I pursued my master’s in computational linguistics, I engaged more directly with technical work in automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text processing, while also engaging with neuroscience and cognitive science curricula and conducting preliminary research and literature reviews in visual cognition and auditory neuroscience. These experiences reaffirmed that my core interests lie not so much in building machine cognition, but in using computational tools to better understand the architecture and function of the human mind—particularly the neural computations underlying real-time language processing (i.e., how the brain predicts and interprets language as it unfolds over time).
And now I'm here in the Cognitive Science program at Johns Hopkins University studying all kinds of fun stuff :)
