Alexis Black

Assistant Professor

Relevant Thesis-Based Degree Programs

Affiliations to Research Centres, Institutes & Clusters

Research Options

I am available and interested in collaborations (e.g. clusters, grants).
I am interested in and conduct interdisciplinary research.
I am interested in working with undergraduate students on research projects.
 
 

Research Methodology

infant looking-time procedures
EEG
Meta-analysis
Eye-tracking

Recruitment

Master's students
Doctoral students
Postdoctoral Fellows
Any time / year round
I support public scholarship, e.g. through the Public Scholars Initiative, and am available to supervise students and Postdocs interested in collaborating with external partners as part of their research.
I support experiential learning experiences, such as internships and work placements, for my graduate students and Postdocs.
I am interested in supervising students to conduct interdisciplinary research.

Complete these steps before you reach out to a faculty member!

Check requirements
  • Familiarize yourself with program requirements. You want to learn as much as possible from the information available to you before you reach out to a faculty member. Be sure to visit the graduate degree program listing and program-specific websites.
  • Check whether the program requires you to seek commitment from a supervisor prior to submitting an application. For some programs this is an essential step while others match successful applicants with faculty members within the first year of study. This is either indicated in the program profile under "Admission Information & Requirements" - "Prepare Application" - "Supervision" or on the program website.
Focus your search
  • Identify specific faculty members who are conducting research in your specific area of interest.
  • Establish that your research interests align with the faculty member’s research interests.
    • Read up on the faculty members in the program and the research being conducted in the department.
    • Familiarize yourself with their work, read their recent publications and past theses/dissertations that they supervised. Be certain that their research is indeed what you are hoping to study.
Make a good impression
  • Compose an error-free and grammatically correct email addressed to your specifically targeted faculty member, and remember to use their correct titles.
    • Do not send non-specific, mass emails to everyone in the department hoping for a match.
    • Address the faculty members by name. Your contact should be genuine rather than generic.
  • Include a brief outline of your academic background, why you are interested in working with the faculty member, and what experience you could bring to the department. The supervision enquiry form guides you with targeted questions. Ensure to craft compelling answers to these questions.
  • Highlight your achievements and why you are a top student. Faculty members receive dozens of requests from prospective students and you may have less than 30 seconds to pique someone’s interest.
  • Demonstrate that you are familiar with their research:
    • Convey the specific ways you are a good fit for the program.
    • Convey the specific ways the program/lab/faculty member is a good fit for the research you are interested in/already conducting.
  • Be enthusiastic, but don’t overdo it.
Attend an information session

G+PS regularly provides virtual sessions that focus on admission requirements and procedures and tips how to improve your application.

 

ADVICE AND INSIGHTS FROM UBC FACULTY ON REACHING OUT TO SUPERVISORS

These videos contain some general advice from faculty across UBC on finding and reaching out to a potential thesis supervisor.

Graduate Student Supervision

Master's Student Supervision

Theses completed in 2010 or later are listed below. Please note that there is a 6-12 month delay to add the latest theses.

Beyond noise: the role of speaker variability on statistical learning (2024)

Statistical learning describes a phenomenon where individuals can detect probabilistic patterns in their environment. In language acquisition, this mechanism has been shown to support learners’ induction of phonological categories (Cristia, 2018), words (Black & Bergmann, 2017), and even morphosyntactic rules (Finn & Hudson Kam, 2008). However, studies demonstrating this phenomenon are typically tightly constrained and artificial; when the laboratory conditions are slightly more complex, learning is surprisingly fragile. In this thesis, I explore the idea that these learning conditions are too artificial and fail because they are missing a key component of the natural language environment: variability. Speaker variability—the acoustic variability that occurs when different people produce the same sounds—has been shown to improve the acquisition of novel language structures (e.g., Graf Estes & Lew-Williams, 2015). I hypothesized that adding speaker variability to an otherwise artificial statistical learning task would enhance learners’ ability to detect underlying statistical patterns.Two experiments were designed to assess the extent of listeners’ sensitivity to underlying structure and word segmentation in a statistical learning paradigm. Participants heard one or multiple voices speaking with either English or non-English phonology when listening to the syllable stream. The syllable stream is constructed such that four trisyllabic pseudowords can be extracted based on the transitional probabilities between syllables. Previous work had shown that adult learners fail to extract words when the phonology is unfamiliar (Black, 2018). It was anticipated that speaker variability would enhance learning in this condition. The second of the two experiments was designed to address questions raised by Experiment 1; it implements adjustments to the stimuli and longer exposure to the syllable stream and limits the sample to only monolingual English speakers. Results from both experiments show that speaker variability may interfere with statistical learning, no matter if the phonology is familiar or unfamiliar. This evidence is consistent with the prediction that speaker variability introduces processing demands that compete with tracking underlying statistics. However, a lack of evidence that the control conditions meet the expected learning outcomes indicate the experimental paradigm likely produces unexpected confounds that warrant further testing.

View record

Concerning labour markets and the commodification of social difference in the Alberta oil sands (2018)

In this thesis, I consider ethnographic conversations I had during fieldwork in Fort McMurray and Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, in 2016 with two sets of workers: Albertan trades-workers employed in the oil sands (pipe-fitters, welders and boilermakers) and Filipino/a Temporary Foreign Workers (TFWs) employed in the local service sector (cooks, caregivers and kitchen helpers). I analyse these workers’ self-reflections on their own work routines as providing a sightline into the ways labour market processes and regulatory frameworks are manifest in and negotiated through their lives. I draw especially on the theories of Karl Polanyi and Karl Marx in my analysis. Through ethnography I also show how the labour market processes these thinkers analyse shape, and are shaped by, social differences they each tend to neglect (e.g. nationality, citizenship, migration status, race, ethnicity, gender), and which more recent post-colonial, feminist, and critical race theorists have emphasised. Hence from the Albertan context, I conceptualise how state-regulated labour markets re-fashion, and are re-fashioned by, the cultural identities of workers. I show how local labour market processes re-make and aggravate social differences between Albertan trades-workers and Filipino/a TFWs in Alberta, in ways that are not superficially or simply motivated by forms of discrimination (e.g. xenophobia, racism, sexism), but which nonetheless agitate and divide an emergent “precariat” (Standing 2011). I hope this thesis can provide the basis for further ethnographic and comparative research.

View record

 
 

If this is your researcher profile you can log in to the Faculty & Staff portal to update your details and provide recruitment preferences.

 
 

Get key application advice, hear about the latest research opportunities and keep up with the latest news from UBC's graduate programs.