Speaker: Amy Li (MIT)
Title: The potential effect of phoneme inventory crowding on phonetic variation
Time: Monday April 6, 5pm – 6:30pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract: Does the crowdedness of a phoneme inventory affect the variability of the realizations of its phonemes? In particular, does a more crowded phoneme inventory reduce the variability of its phonemes? Lavoie (2002) provides some preliminary evidence for such an effect by comparing /k/ in the spontaneous speech of English and Spanish, finding that the percent of phonetically fricative-like or approximant-like realizations is much lower in Spanish (7%), which contrasts /x/ with /k/, than English (21%), which does not. In this presentation, I will discuss my work in progress on the topic, including a new model (and some variants) I’m proposing within Dispersion Theory and my attempts to find evidence for such a cross-linguistic effect on vowel inventories.