Excited to be giving a public lecture in the Abralin series: The Role of Communication Efficiency in Shaping Language. 7 pm Brasilia time this Friday. Tune in live at youtube.com/abralin
Talks by many great linguists abralin.org/site/en/evento/a…
And with Adam Ussishkin as well, a cool new paper showing that there appear to be crosslinguistically near-universal phonological patterns resulting from low information at word-ends. academia.edu/41343299/Crossl…
Adam King and I are really excited that our paper on high early segmental information in less probable words is finally out in Open Mind! mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs…
Andy Wedel retweeted
How do we operationalize the "functional load" of a phoneme?
Wedel suggests that the number of minimal pairs is a very good measure: although it's a relatively coarse and "naive" measure, it's actually the best measure and is highly predictive of mergers: journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs…
Andy Wedel retweeted
Wedel: One of the most common ways in which #English #dialects shift and differentiate themselves is by changing the #vowel space (and less so the consonants)
How do we operationalize the "functional load" of a phoneme?
Wedel suggests that the number of minimal pairs is a very good measure: although it's a relatively coarse and "naive" measure, it's actually the best measure and is highly predictive of mergers: journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs…
Andy Wedel retweeted
New paper by Wedel and colleagues in @LingVanguard showing that the predictability of words can, over time, shape large-scale phonological changes such as phoneme mergers: degruyter.com/view/j/lingvan…
Andy Wedel retweeted
Speakers modulate variation in signals (e.g., phonetic enhancement/reduction) in response to the likelihood of accurate transmission in context. These local, in-the-moment changes can lead to changes in lexical representations and, over time, to structural phonological changes
New paper by Wedel and colleagues in @LingVanguard showing that the predictability of words can, over time, shape large-scale phonological changes such as phoneme mergers: degruyter.com/view/j/lingvan…
Andy Wedel retweeted
Wedel: Based on this model, English's /t/ and /d/ are "ripe for merger"!
Andy Wedel retweeted
The message shapes phonology. How Bayesian inferences for category/word recognition & production can affect phonology. Huge thanks to Kathleen Hall (linguistics.ubc.ca/person/ka…) & Andy Wedel (linguistics.arizona.edu/user…) who did most of the work on this paper degruyter.com/view/j/lingvan… /1