Join us for  “Speech sounds, grouping, and temporal coordination” a keynote presentation by Dr. Jonah Katz, College of Arts & Science – English, MizzouForward faculty candidate.  Dr. Katz will present on his research for approximately 40-minutes with a 20-minute question and answer session to follow.

Jonah Katz received a PhD in linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, after completing undergraduate degrees in linguistics and music performance at the University of Massachusetts. He has held academic appointments at the CNRS Institut Jean-Nicod in the École Normale Supérieure Paris, the University of California Berkeley, and West Virginia University. His work on speech sounds, temporal coordination, and grouping has appeared in top journals in linguistics, acoustics, speech science, and music cognition. His cross-linguistic work on the causal structure of phonological strengthening and weakening is currently supported by an NSF Linguistics grant with co-PI Sergio Robles Puente.

Dr. Katz’s research examines the ways in which speech sounds are coordinated with one another in time, the ways that this coordination is affected by higher-level grouping into meaningful units, and the interaction of these factors with acoustics, perception, and memory. Beyond its inherent value as a contribution to the basic science of speech and language, this research is tied to areas of inquiry including audition, musicology, cognitive science, and communication disorders. His work has touched on several of these topics, and he hopes to pursue collaborative projects with researchers in some of these areas in the years to come.   

This talk outlines some of the major areas of phonetics, phonology, speech science, and cognitive science to which his work has contributed. A central fact about the sounds of human languages is that their properties are context-dependent: the way that linguistic sounds are produced in the vocal tract, their acoustic features, and the way that listeners perceive them are all shaped by surrounding sounds, and by the fine details of how multiple sounds are coordinated in time. Listeners have extensive implicit knowledge of these contextual dependencies and use them to identify speech sounds and infer their grouping into meaningful units. Some context effects in speech are bound up with much more general principles of perception referred to as Gestalt grouping, and these principles link the study of linguistic sound systems to other cognitive domains such as word recognition, musical cognition, language and learning disorders, memory representations, and the temporal dynamics of auditory attention.

You can access Dr. Katz’s CV via OneDrive here:

 BrieferCVAug2023.pdf (University log in required to access)

After the keynote, please provide candidate feedback with our brief survey.