Abstract for Luigi Burzio's talk

Phonetic enhancement: Communication or computation?
Luigi Burzio (Johns Hopkins University)
March 16, 2006 (Thursday)
4:15 PM - ; Room 6417, the CUNY Graduate Center

'Phonetic enhancement' (Stevens, Keyser and Kawasaki 1986) refers to the clustering together of features that have concurring acoustic properties. For instance the features [+round], [+back] are understood to cluster together in many languages because they each lengthen the front cavity, lowering the second formant. A common account of enhancement is in terms of 'dispersion' of phonemic inventories (Lindblom 1986). On this account, enhancement increases distance/ discriminability ([i-u] > [i-,], [y-u]), thus better serving the goals of communication (Flemming 2004).

Instead, I will argue that clustering under similarity derives from a general principle of neural computation whose consequences extend beyond phonemic inventories, covering deeper generalizations in both phonology and morphology.