Rate My Professor Brett Baker

Baker's research specializations encompass phonology, morphology, speech processing, and the grammatical structures of Australian Indigenous languages, with a focus on Gunwinyguan languages including Ngalakgan and Wubuy, as well as Iwaidja and Mawng. He led the Australian Research Council Discovery Project from 2018 to 2021, investigating the cognitive representation of super-complex words in Wubuy—polysynthetic forms equivalent to English sentences—using low-tech experimental methods in collaboration with Professor Janet Fletcher and Dr Rikke Bundgaard-Nielsen. Key publications include "Word Structure in Australian Languages" (with Mark Harvey, Australian Journal of Linguistics, 2003), "Morphology in Australian Languages" (Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics), "Super-Complexity and the Status of 'Word' in Gunwinyguan Languages of Australia," "Lenition, Fortition, and Lexical Access in Iwaidja and Mawng," and "Epenthetic Prefixation in Alawa and Marra" (Australian Journal of Linguistics, 2020). He co-edited "Discourse and Grammar in Australian Languages" and edited "Indigenous Language and Social Identity: Papers in Honour of Michael Walsh" (Pacific Linguistics, 2014). Baker's scholarship, cited over 1,370 times on Google Scholar, has advanced understanding of word status, perceptual epenthesis, and complex morphology in Australian languages.