For most frogs, advertisement calls are essential for reproductive success, conveying information on species identity, male quality, sexual state and location. While the evolutionary divergence of call characters has been examined in a number of species, the relative impacts of genetic drift or natural and sexual selection remain unclear. Insights into the evolutionary trajectory of vocal signa...

A wealth of studies across diverse animal groups indicate the importance of sexual selection in shaping phenotypes within and across breeding populations. In recent decades, much research has focused on how divergent sexual selection pressures among populations may lead to speciation. For my first dissertation chapter, I performed a literature review on the causes and consequences of evolutiona...

Russian maintains a contrast between non-palatalized and palatalized trills that has been lost in most Slavic languages. This research investigates the phonetic expression of this contrast in an attempt to understand how the contrast is maintained. One hypothesis is that the contrast is stabilized through resistance to coarticulation between the trill and surrounding vowels and prosodic positio...

This technical report introduces Quill (stands for a quadrillion tuples per day), a library and distributed platform for relational and temporal analytics over large datasets in the cloud. Quill exposes a new abstraction for parallel datasets and computation, called ShardedStreamable. This abstraction provides the ability to express efficient distributed physical query plans that are transferab...

This study investigates the effectiveness of three high variability training paradigms in training 42 speakers of American English to correctly perceive and produce Spanish intervocalic /d, r, r/. Since Spanish spirantization and English flapping both affect /d/ intervocalically, the acquisition of the /d/-/r/ contrast proves difficult for English learners of Spanish. The acquisition of the tri...

BACKGROUND Auditory laterality is suggested to be characterized by a left hemisphere dominance for the processing of conspecific communication. Nevertheless, there are indications that auditory laterality can also be affected by communicative significance, emotional valence and social recognition. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS In order to gain insight into the effects of caller characteristi...

This paper introduces Quill (stands for a quadrillion tuples per day), a library and distributed platform for relational and temporal analytics over large datasets in the cloud. Quill exposes a new abstraction for parallel datasets and computation, called ShardedStreamable. This abstraction provides the ability to express efficient distributed physical query plans that are transferable, i.e., m...

Theory predicts that forces of natural selection can reduce the intensity of sexually selected traits. In this study, I investigate how morphological adaptation to feeding ecology influences a mating signal. In birds, changes in feeding ecology can cause rapid divergence in bill morphology. Because bills are also important for song production, feeding ecology may influence song divergence. Duri...

Traditionally, the ultrasonic vocal repertoire of rats is differentiated into 22 kHz and 50 kHz calls, two categories that contain multiple different call types. Although both categories have different functions, they are sometimes produced in the same behavioral context. Here, we investigated the peripheral mechanisms that generate sequences of calls from both categories. Male rats, either sex...