Faculty Fellow

Aaron Braver

Words and their relatives: How related forms influence pronunciation

The fine details of a word's pronunciation can be impacted by a variety of factors such as the word's spelling, relative frequency in the language, lexical neighbors (words that sound a lot alike), and morphologically related words (e.g., "capital" is morphologically related to "capitalist"). This project explores the role of these factors by analyzing audio recordings of speech collected in a controlled environment, comparing similar-sounding words for differences so small they are usually not perceived in normal conversation. These small differences have significant implications for how the mind represents language including how are these differences encoded and whether they impact our judgments about rhyming pairs.

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