Phonological Distance Measures

Phonological distance can be measured computationally using formally specified algorithms. This work investigates two such measures, one developed by Nerbonne and Heeringa (1997) based on Levenshtein distance (Levenshtein, 1965) and the other an adaptation of Dunning's (1994) language classifier that uses maximum likelihood distance. These two measures arc compared against naive transcriptions of the speech of paediatric cochlear implant users. The new measure, maximum likelihood distance, correlates highly with Levenshtein distance and naive transcriptions; results from this corpus are easier to obtain since cochlear implant speech has a lower intelligibility than the usually high intelligibility of the speech of a different dialect.