;; PSIMETRICA:  Phonological SIMilarity METRIC Analysis
;; (c) 1998-2004 Shane T. Mueller
;; stmuelle@indiana.edu
;; More info at: http://mypages.iu.edu/~stmuelle
;; May not be copied or distributed without permission.
;; Tools and routines for measuring phonological similarity between words.
;;
;;  doc/readme.txt


PSIMETRICA is a set of LISP routines for measuring the
phonological similarity of words.  The theoretical
description of the process can be found in the paper:
Mueller, S. T., Seymour, T. L., Kieras, D. E., & Meyer,
D. E. (2003). Theoretical implications of articulatory
duration, phonological similarity, and phonological
complexity on verbal working memory. Journal of Experimental
Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 29, 1353-1380.


PSIMETRICA works by positing attempting to create a
'dissimilarity profile' between any two words.  Each
dimension of the profile putatively measures some
psychologically relevant dimension of phonological
similarity.  Currently, we have defined about five: onset,
nucleus, coda, stress, and initial phoneme similarity.

To use PSIMETRICA, first load the file setup-linux.lsp in a
lisp environment.  It almost certainly can be used on
another platform with small modifications to that file--I
have not done so.  

Functions are documented reasonably well in the source.
There is currently no tutorial on how to use PSIMETRICA, but
there may be one in the future if people express interest in
having one.  The basic steps for using it are: (1)
transcribe words of interest into PSIMETRICA representation;
(2) write appropriate code that allows you to compute the
dimensions of interest.  Examples are found in
src/mueller.lsp, which contains these measurements for all
the numbers reported in the above paper.

