[Colloquium] Today: Surendran/M.S. Presentation/November 14th

[Margaret Jaffey]

Important Notice:  The start time of Dinoj Surendran's Master's 
Presentation been revised to 1:30 (it was previously listed as 1:00 
p.m.).


Date:  Friday, November 14, 2003 (Today)

Time:  1:30 p.m.

Place:  Ryerson 276

M.S. Candidate:  Dinoj Surendran

M.S. Paper Title:  The Functional Load of Phonological Contrasts

Abstract:
Frequency counts are a measure of how much use a language makes of a
linguistic unit, such as a phoneme or word. However, what is often
important is not the units themselves, but the contrasts between
them. A measure is therefore needed for how much use a language makes
of a contrast. Linguists have called such a measure the functional load
(FL) of a contrast, but have not been able to define it quantitatively.
This is the gap in the literature we wish to fill.

We generalize previous work in linguistics and speech recognition and
propose a family of measures for the FL of several phonological
contrasts, including phonemic oppositions, distinctive features,
suprasegmentals and some phonological rules. Testing is done for
robustness e.g. to changes of corpora.

This work has relevance for several fields, including historical
linguistics, child language acquisition, speech recognition, language
evolution, and linguistic typology. We give detailed applications in
each field, with computations in Cantonese, Dutch, English, German and
Mandarin.

1. The FL of tone in Mandarin is at least as high as that of
vowels. In other words, it is as important to get the tone of a
syllable in Mandarin correct as to get the vowel right.

2. The recent merger of n and l in Cantonese happened despite the high
FL of the n-l contrast.

3. FL seems to be a more reliable predictor of age of acquisition of
consonants than the frequency of consonants, based on computations in
Cantonese, English and Mandarin.

4. There is no correlation between the ease with which speakers of a
language distinguish two consonants and how important it is to do so.

Parts of the work in this thesis is joint with Partha Niyogi, Gina
Levow and Stephanie Stokes (a psychologist in Newcastle, England). A 
copy
of the thesis can be found at
http://www.cs.uchicago.edu/~dinoj/thesis03.ps

Mr. Surendran's Advisor:  Prof. Partha Niyogi

A draft copy of Mr. Surendran's M.S. paper is available for review in 
Ry 161A.

Margaret
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Margaret P. Jaffey				margaret at cs.uchicago.edu
Department of Computer Science
Student Support Rep (Ry 161A)		(773) 702-6011
The University of Chicago		http://www.cs.uchicago.edu
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