{"id":104,"date":"2008-04-28T05:00:56","date_gmt":"2008-04-28T10:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/whamit.mit.edu\/2008\/04\/28\/mit-linguistics-colloquium-jaye-padgett-may-2\/"},"modified":"2008-04-30T13:37:24","modified_gmt":"2008-04-30T18:37:24","slug":"mit-linguistics-colloquium-jaye-padgett-may-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/2008\/04\/28\/mit-linguistics-colloquium-jaye-padgett-may-2\/","title":{"rendered":"MIT Linguistics colloquium - Jaye Padgett &#038; Nathan Sanders- May 2"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Friday, May 2, 3:30 PM<BR><br clear='none'\/>\n<A HREF=\"http:\/\/whereis.mit.edu\/map-jpg?mapterms=32-141&mapsearch=go\">32D-141<\/A><BR><\/p>\n<p><A HREF=\"http:\/\/people.ucsc.edu\/~padgett\/\">Jaye Padgett<\/A><BR><br clear='none'\/>\nUniversity of California, Santa Cruz<\/p>\n<p><A HREF=\"http:\/\/wso.williams.edu\/~nsanders\/\">Nathan Sanders<\/A><BR><br clear='none'\/>\nWilliams College<\/p>\n<p>The role of dispersion, focalization, and articulation in vowel system simulations<\/p>\n<p>>Since the seminal work of Liljencrants and Lindblom (1972), a key testing<br clear='none'\/>\nground for functional, evolutionary, or emergentist approaches to sound<br clear='none'\/>\nsystems has been the typology of vowel inventories (e.g., Lindblom 1986,<br clear='none'\/>\nSchwartz et al. 1997, and de Boer 2000). An important innovation of Schwartz<br clear='none'\/>\net al.&#8217;s Dispersion and Focalization Theory (DFT) was calculating the<br clear='none'\/>\noptimality (&#8220;energy&#8221;) of a vowel system as a weighted combination of:<\/p>\n<p>>(i) dispersion: minimization of the auditory distance between vowels (as in<br clear='none'\/>\nLiljencrants and Lindblom 1972) and<br clear='none'\/>\n(ii) focalization: maximization of the importance of &#8220;focal&#8221; vowels such as<br clear='none'\/>\n[i] and [y] (cf. Stevens&#8217;s (1972) quantal vowels).<\/p>\n<p>>In this paper, we report results of new vowel system simulations, following<br clear='none'\/>\nthe original DFT calculations of Schwartz et al. for the optimality of a<br clear='none'\/>\ngiven vowel system. However, our algorithm for selecting candidate systems<br clear='none'\/>\nfor comparison explores the search space more effectively, allowing for more<br clear='none'\/>\nthorough and accurate computation of DFT&#8217;s predictions.<\/p>\n<p>>Our results for DFT differ significantly from those published. Specifically,<br clear='none'\/>\nwe find a greater number of optimal systems throughout the entire range of<br clear='none'\/>\npossible parameter settings in DFT. Some of these are attested, meaning the<br clear='none'\/>\nDFT does better at modeling the facts than it was originally thought to do.<br clear='none'\/>\nOther optimal systems are unattested, and these help us better determine the<br clear='none'\/>\nparameter space within which the model performs well. We discuss<br clear='none'\/>\nimplications and further work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Friday, May 2, 3:30 PM 32D-141 Jaye Padgett University of California, Santa Cruz Nathan Sanders Williams College The role of dispersion, focalization, and articulation in vowel system simulations >Since the seminal work of Liljencrants and Lindblom (1972), a key testing ground for functional, evolutionary, or emergentist approaches to sound systems has been the typology of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-talks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=104"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}