Publications

Cram, Coralie; John McGahay; and Megha Sundara. 2026. Vowel allophony improves maximum-likelihood classification of Warlpiri consonants. Proceedings of Interspeech 2026: 7090–7095. [pdf]

McGahay, John. 2025. Modeling vowel system typology using Iterated Confusion Minimization. Proceedings of Interspeech 2025: 2955–2959. [pdf]

McGahay, John. 2026. A theory of vowel system typology based on confusion minimization. Manuscript under review (revised and resubmitted).

McGahay, John. 2026. Optimizing English vowels for word-level perception predicts dialect-specific susceptibility to the cot-caught merger. Manuscript under review.

McGahay, John. Reconceptualizing phonetic contrast and effort: An information-theoretic approach. Manuscript in preparation.

McGahay, John. A computational model of allophony as dispersion over phonetic sequences. Manuscript in preparation.

Harris, Jesse; Christian Muxica; and John McGahay. The neighborhood has gone to h*ll: Competition from high frequency lexical neighbors in pupillometry. Manuscript in preparation.

McGahay, John. 2024. Vowel system typology and confusion minimization. Los Angeles, CA, USA: University of California, Los Angeles MA thesis. [pdf]

McGahay, John. 2019. The effect of conditioned mergers on underlying representations. Philadelphia, PA, USA: University of Pennsylvania BA honors thesis. [pdf]

McGahay, John. 2027. Optimizing US English vowels for word-level perception predicts the cot-caught merger. Talk to be presented at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, San Francisco, CA, USA. [abstract]

McGahay, John. 2026. A computational model of allophony as dispersion over phonetic sequences. Talk presented at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, New Orleans, LA, USA. [abstract] [slides]

McGahay, John. 2025. Modeling vowel system typology using Iterated Confusion Minimization. Talk presented at Interspeech 2025, Rotterdam, The Netherlands. [proceedings] [slides]

McGahay, John. 2019. The effect of conditioned mergers on underlying representations. Talk presented at the 43rd Penn Linguistics Conference, Philadelphia, PA, USA.

McGahay, John. 2026. A computational theory of vowel system typology based on optimal listeners and speakers. Invited talk presented to the UC Berkeley PhonLab, Berkeley, CA, USA. [slides]

Cram, Coralie; John McGahay; and Megha Sundara. 2026. Vowel allophony improves maximum-likelihood classification of Warlpiri consonants. Poster presented at Interspeech 2026, Sydney, NSW, Australia. [proceedings] [poster]

Cram, Coralie; John McGahay; and Megha Sundara. 2026. Vowel inventory size moderates the contribution of vowel allophony to consonant classification: Evidence from Warlpiri and Dalabon. Poster presented at Interspeech 2026, Sydney, NSW, Australia. [poster]

McGahay, John. 2026. A computational model of merger as phonetic dispersion over words. Poster presented at LabPhon 20, Montréal, QC, Canada. [poster]

McGahay, John. 2026. A Bayesian account of perceptual asymmetries in confusion matrix data. Poster presented at the 190th meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, Philadelphia, PA, USA. [poster]

Boulom, Atlas; Coralie Cram; Nicholas Guymon; John McGahay; Zachary Metzler; Emma Montilla; Vishwas Shetty; Jian-Leat Siah; and Meg Cychosz. 2025. A systematic review and meta-analysis of the development of coarticulation in child speech. Poster presented at the 188th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, New Orleans, LA, USA. [poster]

McGahay, John. 2023. A theory of vowel dispersion based on probabilistic modeling of optimized speakers and listeners. Poster presented at the 185th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, Sydney, NSW, Australia. [poster]