Jonah Katz

Associate Professor
UCLA Dept. of Linguistics
katzlinguist@gmail.com

I am a phonetician and phonologist, studying the nature of sound patterns in the world's languages and their relationship to physical and perceptual aspects of speech. I use a wide variety of methodologies: production and perception experiments, traditional grammatical description, corpus studies, computational and statistical modeling. I also study the structure and cognition of music, and some of my recent work explores similarities between music and language in terms of Gestalt principles of grouping and their relationship to abstract constituency.

I got my PhD from MIT Linguistics in 2010. Edward Flemming was the chair of my dissertation committee (Donca Steriade and Adam Albright were the other members). I worked for two years with Philippe Schlenker's team at the ENS Paris, and two years at UC Berkeley Linguistics before getting my first tenure-track job. I've been at UCLA since Fall 2024.