Re: [EXTERNAL] Re: New paper: Schwa density as a phonological register classifier (pre-registered, four-corpus replication)

 Dear Professor Wan,

 Thank you for the pointer to your work — I'll read through the site and
your posts. I appreciate the quickness of your response and look forward to
reading more of it.

  I think our concerns may be partly orthogonal. The paper's headline
measure is phone-level (schwa proportion in CMUdict transcriptions), not
word-level; "word" enters only as an operational unit for the
  Flesch-Kincaid baseline we compare against, and the scope is bounded to
English prose register classification on four named corpora. We don't claim
cross-linguistic generality or make prescriptive claims
  about "language."

 That said, your point about the undefined status of "word" across writing
systems is well-taken, and I'll add a scope/limitations note making the
English-and-CMUdict dependency explicit rather than implicit. It does seem
important to identify and accommodate implicit anglophone bias in
scientific contexts.

  Best,
  Kyle

On Thu, Apr 16, 2026 at 3:22 PM Ada Wan <[email protected]> wrote:

> Dear Kyle
>
> Please be notified of my findings from 2019 on (see
> sites.google.com/view/adawan) as well as all my posts and
> replies/comments on X.com since 2021 (@adawan919) and on LinkedIn.com.
> Please note that working on/with "word(s)" can be considered a violation
> of research integrity and/or of the law.
>
> Feedback:
> While I understand that most of my findings might seem distant to those
> from "linguistics proper", the most important takeaway is the same: "word"
> is not a reliable unit for scientific work. And working on "grammar" and
> "language" is / can be unethical. If you can transition to research without
> working on or leveraging "w/s/ls/g/l", that'd be optimal. Otherwise, an
> immediate feedback to your work would be just do it without "word(s)".
> At the first sight, evaluating schwa density of a particular dataset is
> not wrong in itself --- in fact, from the perspective of linguistics or
> "'language' science" (except my findings show that there cannot be any more
> science with "language"), it could even be avant-garde work to estimate,
> without "words", schwa density of a given document and/or compare it with
> another document. But when one considers how in the context of "language"
> (or "w/s/ls/g/l") being un- and under-defined, and often defaulting
> subliminally to a prescriptive grammarian perspective, it'd be better and
> safer to simply refrain from publishing this kind of philological
> contributions (and yes, I understand that within linguistics, this work
> would/could be considered scientific/rigorous already, but that is not
> enough).
>
> Feel free to let me know if you should have any questions.
>
> Best regards
> Ada Wan
> https://sites.google.com/view/adawan
>
>
> On Thu, Apr 16, 2026 at 8:17 PM Kyle Townsend via Corpora <
> [email protected]> wrote:
>
>>
>> Dear colleagues,
>>
>>   I'd like to share a new preprint on single-feature register
>>   classification in English text:
>>
>>   "Schwa Density as a Phonological Stylistic Classifier: Primary
>>   Stylistic, Secondary Modality -- A Four-Corpus Pre-Registered
>>   Replication"
>>
>>     Preprint:
>> https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/009926/current.pdf?_s=WPGovroKhmABLC0P
>>     Materials/code:
>> https://github.com/kylegtownsend-collab/schwa-density-spgc
>>     Paper site:     https://papers.letsharkness.com/schwa-density/
>>
>>   The paper tests whether schwa density -- the proportion of vowel
>>   phones in a text that are unstressed schwa (CMUdict AH0) -- can
>>   serve as a phonologically motivated single-feature register
>>   classifier. A pre-registered confirmatory plan was applied to NLTK
>>   multi-source (N=164) and the Standardized Project Gutenberg Corpus
>>   (N=2,767), with sensitivity analyses on Brown (N=313) and OANC
>>   (N=4,375).
>>
>>   Headline findings:
>>
>>    - Schwa density matches or exceeds Flesch-Kincaid on all
>>      pre-registered corpora.
>>
>>    - A function-word ablation (masking the 198 NLTK English stopwords
>>      before computing schwa density) preserves or amplifies register
>>      discrimination on all four corpora (eta^2 retention 0.93-1.27),
>>      ruling out stopword frequency as a confound.
>>
>>    - The ablation operationalises a two-regime finding: schwa density
>>      functions as a Primary Stylistic Feature on within-prose
>>      variation (NLTK, SPGC, Brown) and a Secondary Modality Feature on
>>      speech-versus-writing variation (OANC).
>>
>>    - Joint partial-eta^2 retains 46-53% of the register signal on the
>>      pre-registered corpora after controlling jointly for syllables
>>      per word, mean word length, and Latinate ratio.
>>
>>   The pre-registration, deviation log, analyser, ablation and
>>   G2P-fallback scripts, per-corpus feature tables, and
>>   figure-generation code are all openly available in the repository
>>   (MIT / CC-BY-4.0).
>>
>>   Comments and criticisms welcome.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Kyle Townsend
>> Independent
>> [email protected]
>>
>>
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>

-- 
Thanks,
Kyle Townsend
Instructor, English IIA, Humanities, Yearbook I/II
Scotch Plains-Fanwood High School
Pronouns: he/him/his (What's This? <https://www.mypronouns.org/>)

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