Uriel Cohen Priva
Biographic Data
| ID | 803128 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Uriel Cohen Priva |
| GIVEN NAMES | Uriel Cohen |
| FAMILY NAME | Priva |
| SIGNATURE | PRIVA U C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Brown University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5689-1186 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 7 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 30 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 7 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Predictability Affects Spoken Phonological Systems Indirectly
The last three decades have seen a large increase in attempts to explain phonetic and phonological patterns using information theoretic properties such as frequency and predictability. One recurring theme is the attempt to explain phonetic and phonological weakening as following directly from low information content. I argue that the actuation of weakening processes is not consistent with a direct causal route, but is consistent with indirect cau…
A large-scale investigation of vowel co-occurrence patterns in the world’s lexicons
This paper explores whether there are universal trends for vowels that co-occur to share featural properties. The existence of various productive featural vowel harmony systems across the world’s languages suggests that the factors underlying harmony may be universal. An empirical prediction that follows from this proposal is that vowel co-occurrence in the world’s lexicons should be featurally organized. In corpus analyses of two cross-linguisti…
Schwa's duration and acoustic position in American English
Is American English schwa’s position determined solely by the context in which it appears? Do vowels neutralize to schwa when their duration is shorter? We address these two inter-related questions using the Buckeye corpus to study vowel behavior across multiple contexts of spontaneous speech. We find that all except tense high vowels shift to lower F1 values when their duration is relatively short, including lax high vowels and lexical schwas, r…
The causal structure of lenition
Studies of variable lenition patterns converge on two phonetic properties as characteristic of lenition: reduced duration and increased intensity. However, the causal precedence of the two factors remains unclear. We focus on the causal structure of variable lenition. Study 1 examines the relationship between three correlates of lenition—speech rate, stress, and low information content—and their effect on reduced duration and increased intensity.…
The interdependence of frequency, predictability, and informativity in the segmental domain
It has long been noted that language production seems to reflect a correlation between message redundancy and signal reduction. More frequent words and contextually predictable instances of words, for example, tend to be produced with shorter and less clear signals. The same tendency is observed in the language code (e.g. the phonological lexicon), where more frequent words and words that are typically contextually predictable tend to have fewer …
Informativity and the actuation of lenition
What causes Indonesian to lenite word-final /k/, American English to lenite word-final /t/, and Spanish to lenite word-final /s/? This article shows that all three observed lenition patterns can be motivated using a single principle: languages preferentially lenite segments that provide relatively low informativity compared to the amount of informativity those segments carry in other languages. In a comparison of a diverse sample of seven languag…
More than Words
There is mounting evidence that language users are sensitive to the distributional properties of multi-word sequences. Such findings expand the range of information speakers are sensitive to and call for processing models that can represent larger chains of relations. In the current paper we investigate the effect of multi-word statistics on phonetic duration using a combination of experimental and corpus-based research. We ask (a) if phonetic du…
More than Words
There is mounting evidence that language users are sensitive to the distributional properties of multi-word sequences. Such findings expand the range of information speakers are sensitive to and call for processing models that can represent larger chains of relations. In the current paper we investigate the effect of multi-word statistics on phonetic duration using a combination of experimental and corpus-based research. We ask (a) if phonetic du…
The causal structure of lenition
Studies of variable lenition patterns converge on two phonetic properties as characteristic of lenition: reduced duration and increased intensity. However, the causal precedence of the two factors remains unclear. We focus on the causal structure of variable lenition. Study 1 examines the relationship between three correlates of lenition—speech rate, stress, and low information content—and their effect on reduced duration and increased intensity.…
Informativity and the actuation of lenition
What causes Indonesian to lenite word-final /k/, American English to lenite word-final /t/, and Spanish to lenite word-final /s/? This article shows that all three observed lenition patterns can be motivated using a single principle: languages preferentially lenite segments that provide relatively low informativity compared to the amount of informativity those segments carry in other languages. In a comparison of a diverse sample of seven languag…
Schwa's duration and acoustic position in American English
Is American English schwa’s position determined solely by the context in which it appears? Do vowels neutralize to schwa when their duration is shorter? We address these two inter-related questions using the Buckeye corpus to study vowel behavior across multiple contexts of spontaneous speech. We find that all except tense high vowels shift to lower F1 values when their duration is relatively short, including lax high vowels and lexical schwas, r…
More than Words
There is mounting evidence that language users are sensitive to the distributional properties of multi-word sequences. Such findings expand the range of information speakers are sensitive to and call for processing models that can represent larger chains of relations. In the current paper we investigate the effect of multi-word statistics on phonetic duration using a combination of experimental and corpus-based research. We ask (a) if phonetic du…
Informativity and the actuation of lenition
What causes Indonesian to lenite word-final /k/, American English to lenite word-final /t/, and Spanish to lenite word-final /s/? This article shows that all three observed lenition patterns can be motivated using a single principle: languages preferentially lenite segments that provide relatively low informativity compared to the amount of informativity those segments carry in other languages. In a comparison of a diverse sample of seven languag…
The interdependence of frequency, predictability, and informativity in the segmental domain
It has long been noted that language production seems to reflect a correlation between message redundancy and signal reduction. More frequent words and contextually predictable instances of words, for example, tend to be produced with shorter and less clear signals. The same tendency is observed in the language code (e.g. the phonological lexicon), where more frequent words and words that are typically contextually predictable tend to have fewer …
The causal structure of lenition
Studies of variable lenition patterns converge on two phonetic properties as characteristic of lenition: reduced duration and increased intensity. However, the causal precedence of the two factors remains unclear. We focus on the causal structure of variable lenition. Study 1 examines the relationship between three correlates of lenition—speech rate, stress, and low information content—and their effect on reduced duration and increased intensity.…
Schwa's duration and acoustic position in American English
Is American English schwa’s position determined solely by the context in which it appears? Do vowels neutralize to schwa when their duration is shorter? We address these two inter-related questions using the Buckeye corpus to study vowel behavior across multiple contexts of spontaneous speech. We find that all except tense high vowels shift to lower F1 values when their duration is relatively short, including lax high vowels and lexical schwas, r…
Predictability Affects Spoken Phonological Systems Indirectly
The last three decades have seen a large increase in attempts to explain phonetic and phonological patterns using information theoretic properties such as frequency and predictability. One recurring theme is the attempt to explain phonetic and phonological weakening as following directly from low information content. I argue that the actuation of weakening processes is not consistent with a direct causal route, but is consistent with indirect cau…
A large-scale investigation of vowel co-occurrence patterns in the world’s lexicons
This paper explores whether there are universal trends for vowels that co-occur to share featural properties. The existence of various productive featural vowel harmony systems across the world’s languages suggests that the factors underlying harmony may be universal. An empirical prediction that follows from this proposal is that vowel co-occurrence in the world’s lexicons should be featurally organized. In corpus analyses of two cross-linguisti…
Phonetics and Phonology Research (7 works) · Linguistic Variation and Morphology (5 works) · Linguistics (5 works) · Computer Science (4 works) · Mathematics (4 works) · Philosophy (3 works) · Psychology (3 works) · Speech recognition (3 works) · Vowel (3 works) · Duration (music) (2 works)