Jonah Katz

Image of Jonah Katz.

Jonah Katz

Type
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow
Department
Linguistics
2012-13

Jonah Katz received his PhD in linguistics from MIT. His dissertation, Compression effects, perceptual asymmetries, and the grammar of timing examined issues in the fined-grained timing of the physical gestures that make up speech. The thesis suggests that a proper theory of the timing of speech gestures requires consideration not only of the gestures themselves, but also of the perceptual consequences of those gestures for listeners. Dr. Katz has spent the past two years as a CNRS post-doctoral researcher at the Institut Jean-Nicod of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. Much of his time in Paris has been taken up with the structural comparison of language and music, including the rhythmic, syntactic, and information-structural components of both systems. As a Mellon fellow at Berkeley, he will teach mainly in phonetics and phonology, the study of how humans organize their knowledge of linguistic sounds.