Jonah Katz

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

I am a phonetician and phonologist, using a wide variety of methodologies (production and perception experiments, traditional grammatical description, corpus studies, computational and statistical modeling) to study the nature of sound patterns in the world's languages and their relationship to physical and perceptual aspects of speech. 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). My dissertation, 'Compression effects, perceptual asymmetries, and the grammar of timing' is here (PDF, 7 M).

CV (updated 10/2024).

Papers

• (2023). Musical grouping as prosodic implementation. Linguistics and Philosophy, special issue on 'Super Linguistics'. Preprint (LingBuzz).
• (2022) (w/ Pritty Patel-Grosz, Patrick Grosz, Tejaswinee Kelkar, & Alexander Jensenius). From music to dance: The inheritance of semantic inferences. Empirical Issues in Syntax and Semantics 14, 219-238. Open access.
• (2022). Meter, grouping, and event hierarchies in music: A tutorial for linguists. Language and Linguistics Compass 16(9), e12472. Preprint (LingBuzz).
• (2021). Intervocalic lenition is not phonological: Evidence from Campidanese Sardinian. Phonology, 38(4), 651-692. Open access. Data and code available at link.
• (2021) (w/ Michelle Moore). Phonetic Effects in Child and Adult Word Segmentation. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 64(3), 854-869. Preprint; PDF; 1.5 M. Supplemental materials: data and audio.
• (2019) (w/ Gianmarco Pitzanti). The phonetics and phonology of lenition: A Campidanese Sardinian case study. Laboratory Phonology, 10(1), 16. Open access. Data available at link.
• (2018) (w/ Melinda Fricke). Auditory disruption improves word segmentation: a functional basis for lenition phenomena. Glossa, 3(1), 38. Open access. Data available at link.
• (2017). Harmonic syntax of the 12-bar blues: a corpus study. Music Perception, 35(2), 165-192. Preprint (LingBuzz). Supplementary materials: data, statistical models, tree graphs, description of modeling.
• (2017). Style and Flow: A Commentary on Duinker & Martin. Empirical Musicology Review 12, 101-108. Invited commentary on Duinker & Martin 2017, In Search of the Golden Age Hip-Hop Sound. Open access. Data available at link.
• (2017). Exceptional cadential chords and tonal interpretation. In Halpert, Kotek, & van Urk (eds.), A Pesky Set: A Festschrift for David Pesetsky. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Working Papers in Linguistics. 447-456. Preprint (LingBuzz).
• (2016). Lenition, perception, and neutralisation. Phonology 33(1), 43-85. Preprint; PDF; 623 k.
• (2016) (w/ Sarah Lee). Perceptual integration of acoustic cues to laryngeal contrasts in Korean fricatives. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 139(2), 605-611. Preprint; PDF; 651 k.
• (2015). Hip-hop rhymes mirror phonological typology. Lingua 160, 54-73. Preprint; PDF; 418 k. N.B. This paper appeared in Lingua, the original journal with the real editorial team that continues as Glossa, *not* the 'zombie' journal of the same name created by Elsevier in 2015.
• (2015) (w/Emmanuel Chemla and Christophe Pallier). An attentional effect of musical metrical structure. PLoS One 10(11).
• (2013). Asymmetries in English vowel perception mirror compression effects. Phonetica 70, 93-116. Preprint; PDF; 389 k.
• (2012). Compression effects in English. Journal of Phonetics 40(3), 390-402. Preprint; PDF; 979 k. Raw data (tab-delimited .txt, 125k); Description of fields in data file (.txt, 2k).
• (2011) (w/ Lisa Selkirk) Contrastive Focus vs. Discourse-New: Evidence from Prosodic Prominence in English. Language 87(4), 771-816. Preprint; PDF; 1.2 M.
• (2009, 2011) (w/ David Pesetsky). The Identity Thesis for Language and Music. Unpublished manuscript that's been cited many times in published work. Link is to LingBuzz.
• (2008). Towards a Generative Theory of Hip-hop.; PDF; 862 k. Extended handout from the 2008 Tufts conference Music, Language, and Mind. The phonetic aspects of this project ended up as my 2015 Lingua paper, but much to my regret I never really pursued the textsetting aspect. This conference presentation has since been cited in several published papers as a source for generalizations about hip-hop textsetting and rhyme.
• (2008). Romance and restriction; PDF; 552k. MIT generals paper. Unpublished but cited several times in published work.
• (2006). Russian Consonant Cvljusters; PDF; 171k. First-year phonology squib (warning: amateur hour!). Unpublished, but cited several times in published work.