Phonotactics ≈ Phonotactics
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Mapping the Early Language Environment Using All-Day Recordings and Automated Analysis Open
Purpose This research provided a first-generation standardization of automated language environment estimates, validated these estimates against standard language assessments, and extended on previous research reporting language behavior d…
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What Paves the Way to Conventional Language? The Predictive Value of Babble, Pointing, and Socioeconomic Status Open
A child's first words mark the emergence of a uniquely human ability. Theories of the developmental steps that pave the way for word production have proposed that either vocal or gestural precursors are key. These accounts were tested by a…
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Phylogenetic signal in phonotactics Open
Phylogenetic methods have broad potential in linguistics beyond tree inference. Here, we show how a phylogenetic approach opens the possibility of gaining historical insights from entirely new kinds of linguistic data – in this instance, s…
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Learning Tier-based Strictly 2-Local Languages Open
The Tier-based Strictly 2-Local (TSL 2 ) languages are a class of formal languages which have been shown to model long-distance phonotactic generalizations in natural language (Heinz et al., 2011). This paper introduces the Tier-based Stri…
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When Does Maluma/Takete Fail? Two Key Failures and a Meta-Analysis Suggest That Phonology and Phonotactics Matter Open
Eighty-seven years ago, Köhler reported that the majority of students picked the same answer in a quiz: Which novel word form (‘maluma’ or ‘takete’) went best with which abstract line drawing (one curved, one angular). Others have consiste…
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Tier-based locality in long-distance phonotactics : learnability and typology Open
An important property of any language’s sound system is its phonotactics—the unique way in which it allows its inventory of speech sounds to combine. Interestingly, certain types of phonotactic co-occurrence restrictions found in natural l…
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Prosodic exaggeration within infant-directed speech: Consequences for vowel learnability Open
Perceptual experiments with infants show that they adapt their perception of speech sounds toward the categories of the native language. How do infants learn these categories? For the most part, acoustic analyses of natural infant-directed…
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HIATUS RESOLUTION IN XITSONGA Open
Vowel hiatus is dispreferred in many languages of the world. Xitsonga, an understudied cross-border southern Bantu language spoken in South Africa, Mozambique, Swaziland and Zimbabwe, employs a set of four hiatus resolution strategies: gli…
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Nasal consonants, sonority and syllable phonotactics: the dual nasal hypothesis Open
We investigate the phonotactic behaviour of nasal consonants in a database of over 200 languages. Our findings challenge the common classification of nasals as intermediate between obstruents and liquids on the sonority hierarchy. Instead,…
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Sanskrit n-Retroflexion is Input-Output Tier-Based Strictly Local Open
Sanskrit /n/-retroflexion is one of the most complex segmental processes in phonology. While it is still star-free, it does not fit in any of the subregular classes that are commonly entertained in the literature. We show that when constru…
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Perspectives On The Quechua–Aymara Contact Relationship And The Lexicon And Phonology Of Pre-Proto-Aymara Open
The complex, multilayered contact between the Quechuan and Aymaran languages is a central but still poorly understood issue in Andean prehistory. This paper proposes a periodization of that relationship and characterizes some aspects of th…
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Attenuated Spreading in Sanskrit Retroflex Harmony Open
Drawing on a two-million-word corpus of Sanskrit, the article documents and analyzes two previously unrecognized generalizations concerning the morphoprosodic conditioning of retroflex spreading ( nati). Both reveal harmony to be attenuate…
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Asymmetric distribution of vowels in Nivkh Open
It has been reported in literature that languages often limit their maximal inventory of vocalic contrasts to prosodically prominent positions. Nivkh is one such language, which permits each of the vowels /i ɨ u e o a/ in stressed syllable…
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Neural Underpinnings of Phonotactic Rule Learning Open
This study used behavioral measures and ERP difference waves to measure the underlying brain processes during the categorization of grammatical vs ungrammatical stimuli according to a lab learned phonotactic rule. The results show that par…
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Phonological and phonetic properties of nasal substitution in Sasak and Javanese Open
Austronesian languages such as Sasak and Javanese have a pattern of morphological nasal substitution, where nasals alternate with homorganic oral obstruents—except that [s] is described as alternating with [ɲ], not with [n]. This appears t…
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Syllable structure and prosodic words in Early Old French Open
This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the phonotactics of syllable rhymes based on all unique tokens in two Early Old French texts. Based on the data from this single, conservative variety, I develop Jacobs’ (1994) proposal that …
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BabyBERTa: Learning More Grammar With Small-Scale Child-Directed Language Open
Transformer-based language models have taken the NLP world by storm. However, their potential for addressing important questions in language acquisition research has been largely ignored. In this work, we examined the grammatical knowledge…
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Long-Distance Phonotactics as Tier-Based Strictly 2-Local Languages Open
This paper shows that the properties of locality observed for patterns of long-distance consonant agreement and disagreement belong to a well-defined and relatively simple class of subregular formal languages (stringsets) called the Tier-b…
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Reassessing the Role of the Syllable in Italian Phonology : An Experimental Study of Consonant Cluster Syllabification, Definite Article Allomorphy, and Segment Duration Open
TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION CHAPTER 2: CONSONANT CLUSTER SYLLABIFICATION CHAPTER 3: DEFINITE ARTICLE ALLOMORPHY CHAPTER 4: SEGMENT DURATION CHAPTER 5: SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION END NOTES REFERENCES INDEX
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Phonotactic Complexity and Its Trade-offs Open
We present methods for calculating a measure of phonotactic complexity—bits per phoneme— that permits a straightforward cross-linguistic comparison. When given a word, represented as a sequence of phonemic segments such as symbols in the i…
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Learning Phonology from Surface Distributions, Considering Dutch and English Vowel Duration Open
In learning language, children must discover how to interpret the linguistic significance of phonetic variation. On some accounts, receptive phonology is grounded in perceptual learning of phonetic categories from phonetic distributions dr…
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The SIGMORPHON 2020 Shared Task on Multilingual Grapheme-to-Phoneme Conversion Open
Kyle Gorman, Lucas F.E. Ashby, Aaron Goyzueta, Arya McCarthy, Shijie Wu, Daniel You. Proceedings of the 17th SIGMORPHON Workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology. 2020.
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Detecting structured repetition in child-surrounding speech: Evidence from maximally diverse languages Open
Caretakers tend to repeat themselves when speaking to children, either to clarify their message or to redirect wandering attention. This repetition also appears to support language learning. For example, words that are heard more frequentl…
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The Role of Statistical Learning in Understanding and Treating Spoken Language Outcomes in Deaf Children With Cochlear Implants Open
Purpose Statistical learning—the ability to learn patterns in environmental input—is increasingly recognized as a foundational mechanism necessary for the successful acquisition of spoken language. Spoken language is a complex, serially pr…
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The emergence of interior vowels and heterosyllabic vowel sequences in Ngwi (Bantu B861, DRC) Open
In this article, we offer a historical account of the development of two phonemic ‘interior’ vowels, [ə] and [ɤ], and heterosyllabic vowel sequences in Ngwi, a virtually undescribed West-Coastal Bantu language spoken in the western part of…
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Contiguity-based sound iconicity: The meaning of words resonates with phonetic properties of their immediate verbal contexts Open
We tested the hypothesis that phonosemantic iconicity--i.e., a motivated resonance of sound and meaning--might not only be found on the level of individual words or entire texts, but also in word combinations such that the meaning of a tar…
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Phonetic Distinctiveness vs. Lexical Contrastiveness in Non-Robust Phonemic Contrasts Open
It is known that the mid vowel contrasts of Standard Italian distinguish few minimal pairs, may be lexically variable, and show some degree of phonological conditioning in certain varieties. As such, they are relevant to recent suggestions…
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Sequential Filtering Processes Shape Feature Detection in Crickets: A Framework for Song Pattern Recognition Open
Intraspecific acoustic communication requires filtering processes and feature detectors in the auditory pathway of the receiver for the recognition of species-specific signals. Insects like acoustically communicating crickets allow describ…
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Using lexical language models to detect borrowings in monolingual wordlists Open
Lexical borrowing, the transfer of words from one language to another, is one of the most frequent processes in language evolution. In order to detect borrowings, linguists make use of various strategies, combining evidence from various so…
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Vocabulary Facilitates Speech Perception in Children With Hearing Aids Open
Purpose We examined the effects of vocabulary, lexical characteristics (age of acquisition and phonotactic probability), and auditory access (aided audibility and daily hearing aid [HA] use) on speech perception skills in children with HAs…