Grounding sound change in ideal observer models of perception
Zachary Burchill, T. Florian Jaeger · 2017
An important predictor of historical sound change, functional load, fails to capture insights from speech perception.Building on ideal observer models of word recognition, we devise a new definition of functional load that incorporates both a priori expectedness and perceptual information.We explore this new measure with a simple model and find that it outperforms traditional measures.