Senior Liniguistics Major Alicia Chatten presented a poster this weekend at the Mid-Continental Phonetics and Phonology Conference at Michigan State University. Her project "Phenomenal Accent Patterns" investigates the possibility of incorporating the distinction between phenomenal accent and metrical accent, a common feature of theories of musical rhythm, into metrical stress theory. She wrote a program in Python to generate sets of output candidates where the same metrical pattern was mapped to a range of different phenomenal accent patterns. She then devised a set of constraints and used OTWorkplace and her candidate sets to test the constraints' predictions. The project was the focus of her Gilbert W. Meier and Colene McKinney Undergraduate Internship this summer, and it will be a significant component of her honors thesis.
