Andy Wedel

Professor of linguistics at @uofa

[Andy Wedel @AndyWedel]

@glupyan Adam Ussishkin has had the maddening experience of submitting amazing research on lexical processing in Maltese - a language that allows us to ask questions impossible to address in English - and having editors decline to review it because why would they? it's not on English.

[Andy Wedel @AndyWedel]

@haspelmath I want that book NOW :) But our library won't have it for a year, or more likely never.

[Andy Wedel @AndyWedel]

@TimoRoettger Can someone be one of the very best researchers and one of the very best human beings at the same time? Yup - Bodo's our existence proof.

[Andy Wedel @AndyWedel]

@ev_fedorenko @smallhannahe I think being led to change a deeply held prior by serious engagement with data is one of the most exciting, life-changing experiences a researcher can have. It's happened to me twice - and each time I was transported to the giddy thrill of adolescence where anything can happen.

[Andy Wedel @AndyWedel]

@SemplePrimate Yes, apparently they'll all be archived on youtube. It'll end up as a nice little compendium.

[Andy Wedel @AndyWedel]

Excited to be giving a public lecture in the Abralin series: The Role of Communication Efficiency in Shaping Language. 7 pm Brasilia time this Friday. Tune in live at https://t.co/glKV1jJHhZ
Talks by many great linguists https://t.co/4wF4KPz38v

[Andy Wedel @AndyWedel]

And with Adam Ussishkin as well, a cool new paper showing that there appear to be crosslinguistically near-universal phonological patterns resulting from low information at word-ends. https://t.co/HcGaPZlPtv

[Andy Wedel @AndyWedel]

Adam King and I are really excited that our paper on high early segmental information in less probable words is finally out in Open Mind! https://t.co/HB6AesERCH

[Dr. Limor Raviv 🦄🤗🐘🦒 @Limor_Raviv]

How do we operationalize the "functional load" of a phoneme?
Wedel suggests that the number of minimal pairs is a very good measure: although it's a relatively coarse and "naive" measure, it's actually the best measure and is highly predictive of mergers: https://t.co/DNh44QkXOy

[Dr. Limor Raviv 🦄🤗🐘🦒 @Limor_Raviv]

Wedel: One of the most common ways in which #English #dialects shift and differentiate themselves is by changing the #vowel space (and less so the consonants)

[Dr. Limor Raviv 🦄🤗🐘🦒 @Limor_Raviv]

New paper by Wedel and colleagues in @LingVanguard showing that the predictability of words can, over time, shape large-scale phonological changes such as phoneme mergers: https://t.co/KypzjaaANb

[Dr. Limor Raviv 🦄🤗🐘🦒 @Limor_Raviv]

Speakers modulate variation in signals (e.g., phonetic enhancement/reduction) in response to the likelihood of accurate transmission in context. These local, in-the-moment changes can lead to changes in lexical representations and, over time, to structural phonological changes

[Dr. Limor Raviv 🦄🤗🐘🦒 @Limor_Raviv]

Wedel: Based on this model, English's /t/ and /d/ are "ripe for merger"!

[T. Florian Jaeger @_hlplab_]

The message shapes phonology. How Bayesian inferences for category/word recognition & production can affect phonology. Huge thanks to Kathleen Hall (https://t.co/JUPp4mgyHL) & Andy Wedel (https://t.co/AEmKEHeV1d) who did most of the work on this paper https://t.co/1xNBRsPE3z /1

[Andy Wedel @AndyWedel]

Entering the 21st century #myfirstTweet