GREENWOOD TO DEFEND DISSERTATION

This Friday (June 3), Anna Greenwood will defend her dissertation, entitled “An experimental investigation of phonetic naturalness”:

The goal of this dissertation is to use experimental methods to investigate the driving force behind typological asymmetries that are based on phonetic naturalness. It has been widely observed that patterns that are grounded in phonetics are common, whereas the unnatural equivalents of these patterns are either rare or unattested. I argue that these observed naturalness asymmetries can be explained entirely by perception and production, as opposed to an ingrained learning bias against unnatural patterns. The experiments in this dissertation support this: participants do struggle to learn the unnatural pattern, but not when the experimental stimuli are exceptionally clear. This account also provides some explanation for the discrepancies between previous research on naturalness in the lab. The findings of this dissertation pave the way for a better understanding of how to accurately recreate naturalness-based asymmetries in the lab.

The defense will take place at 2 pm in Humanities 1 (Room 210).