Whamit!

The Weekly Newsletter of MIT Linguistics

Phonology Circle 3/29 - Sverre Stausland Johnsen

Speaker: Sverre Stausland Johnsen (Harvard University)
Title: Rhyme acceptability determined by perceived similarity
Time: Tuesday 3/29, 5-6pm, 32-D831

Intuitively, a-b is a better rhyme than a-c when a and b are more ‘similar’ to each other than a and c are. But how do we measure this similarity? I show in this talk that the perceptual similarity between segments as calculated from confusion matrices is a much better predictor of people’s judgments of rhymes than are similarity measures based on articulatory or acoustic feature systems.

Upcoming talks:
Apr 5: Anne-Michelle Tessier
Apr 12: Ricardo Bermudez-Otero
Apr 13, 3-5pm: WCCFL Practice Talks ***Note Special Day and Time
Apr 26: Jongho Jun
May 3: Nina Topintzi
May 10: RUMMIT practice talks

You can view the current, up-to-date version of the schedule here (click ‘agenda’ to see the schedule as a list), or subscribe via iCal here.