Diachronic development of phonological patters

The project is aimed at investigating the diachronic development of phonological patterns over time, combining the analysis of diachronic linguistic corpora (e.g. literary text) with methods from psycholinguistics. The internship involves all (or a subset of) the following steps: establishing the corpus of relevant diachronic data, conducting as corpus analysis investigating the role of frequency effects on sound change (testing a.o. the Frequency Actuation Hypothesis), investigating the emergence of lexical restrictions, investigating the implications of the results for phonological theories of the diachronic development of sound patterns. Some background in phonology is useful but not necessary. Basic knowledge and interest in the manipulation and analysis of written corpora are required.