About

Jonah Katz is an Associate Professor at UCLA in the Department of Linguistics. He is a phonetician and phonologist, studying the nature of sound patterns in the world's languages and their relationship to physical and perceptual aspects of speech. His research employs a wide variety of methodologies, including production and perception experiments, traditional grammatical description, corpus studies, and computational and statistical modeling. In addition to his work on language sounds, he studies the structure and cognition of music, with recent work exploring similarities between music and language in terms of Gestalt principles of grouping and their relationship to abstract constituency. Katz earned his PhD from MIT in Linguistics in 2010, with Edward Flemming serving as the chair of his dissertation committee, alongside Donca Steriade and Adam Albright. He has worked for two years with Philippe Schlenker's team at the ENS Paris and two years at UC Berkeley Linguistics before securing his first tenure-track position. He has been at UCLA since Fall 2024. His academic contributions include a comprehensive CV updated as of April 2025, a full list of his papers, and his 2010 MIT dissertation available in PDF format.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Linguistics
• Psychology
• Artificial Intelligence
• Philosophy
• Cognitive science
• Cognitive psychology
• Psychotherapist
• Clinical psychology
• Psychiatry
• Medicine
• Mathematics education
• Speech recognition

Selected publications

• An outline of the narrative grammar of electronic dance music

  Musicae Scientiae · 2025-04-12

  articleOpen access

  We argue that electronic dance music (EDM) exhibits a parallel structural organization to that which has been proposed for cartoons (comics) after the model of hierarchical structure proposed in theoretical linguistics. According to this parallel, both systems are governed by general cognitive mechanisms for the narrative organization of tension and release, which are not modality-specific. We show that notions from visual narrative analysis, such as an Establisher–Initial–Peak–Release template, can be applied directly to EDM tracks as an Intro/Breakdown–Buildup–Core–Outro/Cut template. In doing so, we focus on how to formally define and operationalize relevant notions such as Breakdown, Buildup, and Core. As part of our analysis, we show that the scene-setting Establisher segments of visual narratives map onto two distinct categories in EDM: they correspond to intro sections at the beginning of a track and to breakdown sections in the middle of a track; we strengthen the analogy to visual narrative analysis by introducing refinements such as a pre-drop break that often occurs at the end of a buildup segment. To adjudicate between competing hypotheses on the hierarchical structure of a given EDM track, we demonstrate that analytical tests from linguistics and visual narrative analysis can be successfully applied. By introducing these analytical tools, this article sets the stage for further explorations in the linguistically informed analysis of the structure and meaning of EDM.

  PublisherDOI

• Synchronic Lenition

  Elsevier eBooks · 2025-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Is Second Language Attrition Inevitable After Instruction Ends? An Exploratory Longitudinal Study of Advanced Instructed Second Language Users

  Language Learning · 2024-08-04 · 9 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Most second language acquisition (SLA) research has documented the processes involved in learning second/foreign languages, with few studies focusing on the durability of attained second language (L2) skills once instructed learners/users are no longer receiving formal instruction. The current study examines the effects of continued exposure and peak instructional attainment on the long‐term evolution of advanced, instructed L2 learners’ skills following a longitudinal mixed‐methods research design. Participants ( n = 28) completed an oral proficiency test, an oral interview, and a vocabulary knowledge test at multiple times over an 8‐year period, 6 years of which were postinstruction. Results showed that continued exposure contributes to long‐term retention (and some further development) of oral proficiency and fluency and that peak attainment at the end of formal instruction is also an important variable for some areas of L2 performance. Additionally, even the participants with limited exposure demonstrated little attrition over time.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Metre, grouping, and event hierarchies in music: A tutorial for linguists

  Language and Linguistics Compass · 2022-09-01 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This paper reviews some basic elements of musical structure, drawing from work in traditional and cognitive musicology, ethnomusicology, psychology, and generative textsetting. Music features two different hierarchical representational components that can both be visualised in grid notation: metrical structure and event hierarchies (also referred to as Time‐Span Reduction). Metrical structure is an abstract pattern of stronger and weaker points in time that form a temporal ‘scaffold’ against which auditory events occur, but is partly independent from those occurring events. Event hierarchies encode the constituency (referred to as grouping ) and prominence of actually‐occurring musical events. Basic principles of these components are illustrated with examples from Western children's, folk, and popular song. The need for both metrical hierarchy and event hierarchy is illustrated using mismatches between metrical and rhythmic structure. The formal, conceptual, and empirical features of musical metre are quite different from linguistic stress and prosody, despite the frequent analogies drawn between them. Event hierarchies, on the other hand, are shown to resemble linguistic prosodic structure with regard to all of these features.

  PublisherDOI

• Musical grouping as prosodic implementation

  Linguistics and Philosophy · 2022 · 7 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Linguistics
  • Artificial Intelligence
  PublisherDOI

• Phonetic Effects in Child and Adult Word Segmentation

  Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research · 2021-02-11 · 4 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Purpose The aim of the study was to investigate the effects of specific acoustic patterns on word learning and segmentation in 8- to 11-year-old children and in college students. Method Twenty-two children (ages 8;2-11;4 [years;months]) and 36 college students listened to synthesized "utterances" in artificial languages consisting of six iterated "words," which followed either a phonetically natural lenition-fortition pattern or an unnatural (cross-linguistically unattested) antilenition pattern. A two-alternative forced-choice task tested whether they could discriminate between occurring and nonoccurring sequences. Participants were exposed to both languages, counterbalanced for order across subjects, in sessions spaced at least 1 month apart. Results Children showed little evidence for learning in either the phonetically natural or unnatural condition nor evidence of differences in learning across the two conditions. Adults showed the predicted (and previously attested) interaction between learning and phonetic condition: The phonetically natural language was learned better. The adults also showed a strong effect of session: Subjects performed much worse during the second session than the first. Conclusions School-age children not only failed to demonstrate the phonetic asymmetry demonstrated by adults in previous studies but also failed to show strong evidence for any learning at all. The fact that the phonetic asymmetry (and general learning effect) was replicated with adults suggests that the child result is not due to inadequate stimuli or procedures. The strong carryover effect for adults also suggests that they retain knowledge about the sound patterns of an artificial language for over a month, longer than has been reported in laboratory studies of purely phonetic/phonological learning. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.13641284.

  PublisherDOI

• Mindfulness meditation and foreign language classroom anxiety: Findings from a randomized control trial

  Foreign Language Annals · 2021 · 39 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Psychology
  • Clinical psychology
  • Psychotherapist

  Abstract Many scholars have argued that mindfulness meditation (MM) can be beneficial in academic contexts. Recently, researchers in second language acquisition have found that higher trait mindfulness scores indicate lower foreign language classroom anxiety (FLCA). The present study investigates if mindfulness scores can be increased, if FLCA decreases as a result of a mindfulness intervention, and what opinions language learners have toward MM as a way of alleviating FLCA. Data were collected in a postsecondary learning environment where experimental group participants ( n = 76) and control group participants ( n = 66) were compared. As a result, mindfulness scores were negatively correlated with FLCA at beginning of the study. There were, however, mixed findings between groups after a 13‐week series of MMs. Experimental participants gave strongly positive opinions toward the MM in their open‐ended responses to their experience.

  PublisherDOI

• Intervocalic lenition is not phonological: evidence from Campidanese Sardinian

  Phonology · 2021 · 10 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Linguistics
  • Computer Science

  This paper develops a model of lenition in Campidanese Sardinian. The model treats lenition (and its inverse, fortition) as a predictable consequence of gradient changes in duration associated with prosodic structure. A more typical approach to lenition processes in Campidanese and other languages is to treat them as changes in phonological features. I show here that a phonetic model operating on the output of phonological computations avoids some of the analytical problems associated with such phonological analyses, unifies the phonetic and phonological description of lenition, and captures the relationship between prosody, lenition and duration. While the detailed simulations here are specific to Campidanese, I suggest that the model is broadly applicable to languages with intervocalic lenition processes such as voicing, spirantisation and tapping.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The phonetics and phonology of lenition: A Campidanese Sardinian case study

  Laboratory Phonology Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology · 2019-09-26 · 25 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This paper gives a detailed description of the consonant system of Campidanese Sardinian and makes methodological and theoretical contributions to the study of lenition. The data are drawn from a corpus of field recordings, including roughly 400 utterances produced by 15 speakers from the Trexenta and Western Campidanese areas. Campidanese has a complex lenition system that interacts with length, voicing, and manner contrasts. We show that the semi-automated lenition analysis presented in this journal by Ennever, Meakins, and Round can be fruitfully extended to our corpus, despite its much more heterogeneous set of materials in a genetically distant language. Intensity measurements from this method do not differ qualitatively from more traditional ones in their ability to detect lenition-fortition patterns, but do differ in interactions with stress. Lenition-fortition patterns reveal at least three levels of prosodic constituent in Campidanese, each of which is associated with medial lenition and initial fortition. Lenition affects all consonants and V-V transitions. It reduces duration, increases intensity, and probabilistically affects qualitative manner and voicing features in obstruents. Mediation analysis using regression modeling suggests that some intensity and most qualitative reflexes of lenition are explained by changes in duration, but not <em>vice versa</em>.

  PublisherDOI

• Haruo Kubozono (ed.) (2017). The phonetics and phonology of geminate consonants. (Oxford Studies in Phonology and Phonetics 2.) Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pp. x+408.

  Phonology · 2018-08-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

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Frequent coauthors

• Emmanuel Chemla

  École des hautes études en sciences sociales

  12 shared

• Christophe Pallier

  Cognitive Neuroimaging Lab

  12 shared

• Michelle W. Moore

  Google (United States)

  4 shared

• Sarah Bakst

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  2 shared

• Amanda Huensch

  University of Pittsburgh

  1 shared

• Melinda Fricke

  University of Pittsburgh

  1 shared

• William Justin Morgan

  West Virginia University

  1 shared

• Della Chambless

  Duke University

  1 shared

Education

• Ph.D.

  MIT Linguistics

  2010