相关论文: Measuring the Functional Load of Phonological Cont…
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…
The term 'phoneme' lies at the heart of speech science and technology, and yet it is not clear that the research community fully appreciates its meaning and implications. In particular, it is suspected that many researchers use the term in…
Function Load (FL) quantifies the contributions by phonological contrasts to distinctions made across the lexicon. Previous research has linked particularly low values of FL to sound change. Here we broaden the scope of enquiry into FL, to…
Spoken word recognition involves at least two basic computations. First is matching acoustic input to phonological categories (e.g. /b/, /p/, /d/). Second is activating words consistent with those phonological categories. Here we test the…
Growing digital archives and improving algorithms for automatic analysis of text and speech create new research opportunities for fundamental research in phonetics. Such empirical approaches allow statistical evaluation of a much larger set…
A frequency counter measures the input frequency $\bar{\nu}$ averaged over a suitable time $\tau$, versus the reference clock. High resolution is achieved by interpolating the clock signal. Further increased resolution is obtained by…
The distribution of frequency counts of distinct words by length in a language's vocabulary will be analyzed using two methods. The first, will look at the empirical distributions of several languages and derive a distribution that…
The traditional approach to morphological inflection (the task of modifying a base word (lemma) to express grammatical categories) has been, for decades, to consider lexical entries of lemma-tag-form triples uniformly, lacking any…
In this paper I propose a new way of measuring linguistic productivity that objectively assesses the ability of an affix to be used to coin new complex words and, unlike other popular measures, is not directly dependent upon token…
The dependence of the frequency distributions due to multiple meanings of words in a text is investigated by deleting letters. By coding the words with fewer letters the number of meanings per coded word increases. This increase is measured…
Phonology, the study of speech's structure and pronunciation rules, is a critical yet often overlooked component in Large Language Model (LLM) research. LLMs are widely used in various downstream applications that leverage phonology such as…
Knowing the degree of semantic contrast between words has widespread application in natural language processing, including machine translation, information retrieval, and dialogue systems. Manually-created lexicons focus on opposites, such…
The inverse relationship between the length of a word and the frequency of its use, first identified by G.K. Zipf in 1935, is a classic empirical law that holds across a wide range of human languages. We demonstrate that length is one…
We present a method of finding and analyzing shifts in grammatical relations found in diachronic corpora. Inspired by the econometric technique of measuring return and volatility instead of relative frequencies, we propose them as a way to…
It has been claimed that within a language, morphologically irregular words are more likely to be phonotactically simple and morphologically regular words are more likely to be phonotactically complex. This inverse correlation has been…
What statistical properties might support learning abstract grammatical knowledge from linear input? We address this question by examining the statistical distribution of function words. Function words have been argued to aid acquisition…
Language change is a cultural evolutionary process in which variants of linguistic variables change in frequency through processes analogous to mutation, selection and genetic drift. In this work, we apply a recently-introduced method to…
This position paper describes an experiment conducted to understand the relationships between different physiological measures including pupil Diameter, Blinking Rate, Heart Rate, and Heart Rate Variability in order to develop an estimation…
Compositionality in language refers to how much the meaning of some phrase can be decomposed into the meaning of its constituents and the way these constituents are combined. Based on the premise that substitution by synonyms is…
We develop a model of phonological contrast in natural language. Specifically, the model describes the maintenance of contrast between different words in a language, and the elimination of such contrast when sounds in the words merge. An…