News

Phorum is a lively weekly talk and discussion series, coordinated by graduate students and attended by students, visitors and faculty. Phorum features presentations on all aspects of phonology and phonetics by Berkeley linguists and out-of-town visitors. Go to this semester's schedule

The Phonology Laboratory (Keith Johnson, Director; John Ohala, emeritus Director) is a research and teaching laboratory within the Linguistics Department.

The long-term objective of Keith Johnson's NIH-funded research project is to understand human spoken language processing (particularly speech perception and auditory word recognition) in linguistic context. Speech signals are unique in human experience because they are highly familiar, and have great practical significance in daily life. Therefore, it is not too surprising to find that people develop optimized processing strategies tuned specifically for speech.

Word meanings across languages are sometimes viewed as reflecting a universal conceptual repertoire - or, at the other extreme, culturally varying linguistic convention. This project, headed by Terry Regier, explores a third possibility: that there are better and worse ways of partitioning semantic space for the purposes of communication, and that systems of word meanings across languages tend to reflect near-optimal partitions of such a space. This idea can in principle account for both universal tendencies and some degree of linguistic convention.