{"id":17893,"date":"2026-04-06T06:12:00","date_gmt":"2026-04-06T10:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/whamit.mit.edu\/?p=17893"},"modified":"2026-04-05T17:46:44","modified_gmt":"2026-04-05T21:46:44","slug":"phonology-circle-amy-li-mit-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/2026\/04\/06\/phonology-circle-amy-li-mit-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Phonology Circle  4\/6 - Amy Li (MIT)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Speaker: <\/strong> Amy Li (MIT)<br class=\"\" \/><br clear='none'\/>\n<strong>Title: <\/strong>The potential effect of phoneme inventory crowding on phonetic variation<br class=\"\" \/><br clear='none'\/>\n<strong>Time: <\/strong>Monday April 6, 5pm - 6:30pm<br class=\"\" \/><br clear='none'\/>\n<strong>Location: <\/strong>32-D831<br class=\"\" \/><br clear='none'\/>\n<br class=\"\" \/><br clear='none'\/>\n<strong>Abstract: <\/strong>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&#8217;m proposing within Dispersion Theory and my attempts to find evidence for such a cross-linguistic effect on vowel inventories.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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? [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17893","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-announcements"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17893","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\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17893"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17893\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17922,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17893\/revisions\/17922"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}