Phonological Distance Measures*

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Abstract
Phonological distance can be measured computationally using formally specified algorithms. This work investigates two such measures, one developed by Nerbonne and Heeringa ( 1997 Nerbonne, J. and Heeringa, W. J. 1997. “Measuring dialect distance phonetically”. In Workshop on Computational Phonology, Edited by: Coleman, J. 11–18. Madrid. [Google Scholar] ) based on Levenshtein distance (Levenshtein, 1965 Levenshtein, V. I. 1965. Binary codes capable of correcting deletions, insertions, and reversals. Doklady Akademii, 163(4): 845–848. [Google Scholar] ) and the other an adaptation of Dunning's ( 1994 Dunning, T. 1994. Technical Report, New Mexico State University. [Google Scholar] ) language classifier that uses maximum likelihood distance. These two measures are compared against naïve transcriptions of the speech of paediatric cochlear implant users. The new measure, maximum likelihood distance, correlates highly with Levenshtein distance and naïve 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.

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