Language and Cognition

Gibson et al. (2017) argued that color naming is shaped by patterns of communicative need. In support of this claim, they showed that color naming systems across languages support more precise communication about warm colors than cool colors, and that the objects we talk about tend to be warm-colored rather than cool-colored. Here, we present new analyses that alter this picture. We show that greater communicative precision for warm than for cool colors, and greater communicative need, may both be explained by perceptual structure. However, using an information-theoretic analysis, we also...

Advisor: Eve Sweetser

A widely-cited study investigating effects of recognition difficulty on the phonetic realization of words (Wright, 2004). Factors of lexical competition in vowel articulation. In J. Local, R. Ogden & R. Temple (Eds.), Papers in laboratory phonology, Vol. VI (pp. 26–50)) reported that vowel dispersion, i.e. distance from the center of the talker's F1/F2 space, was greater in words that represented difficult recognition targets (‘...

We examine the relationship of lexical representations, pronunciation variation, and word recognition, by investigating effects of two lexical variables: Phonological Neighborhood Density (the number of words that can be formed by a single phoneme substitution, addition, or deletion from the target word), as well as a measure of the perceptual similarity of a target word to other words in the lexicon. We show that perceptual similarity to other words affects recognition, but not production. Phonological Neighborhood Density, on the other hand, affects both word durations and...