Phonological naturalness and phonotactic
learning
by Bruce Hayes and James White, UCLA
To appear in Linguistic Inquiry, probably early 2013
Abstract
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We investigate whether the principles of phonotactic well-formedness internalized
by language learners are direct reflections of the phonological patterns
they encounter, or reflect in addition endogenous principles such as phonetic
naturalness. As a research tool we employ the phonotactic learning system
proposed by Hayes and Wilson (2008), which carries out an unbiased search
of the lexicon for valid phonotactic generalizations. Applying this system
to English data, we find that it learns many constraints that seem to be
unnatural-they have no evident typological or phonetic basis, yet hold true
of the English lexicon. We tested the status of ten of these constraints
in a nonce-probe study, obtaining native-speaker judgments of novel words
that violated them. We used 40 such words: (a) 10 that violated our "accidentally
true" constraints, 10 violating natural constraints assigned comparable weights
by the Hayes/Wilson learner, and 20 violation-free forms, each similar to
a test form and employed as a control. In two experiments, we found that
violations of the natural constraints had a powerful effect on native speaker
judgment, and violations of the unnatural constraints had at best a weak
one. We conclude by assessing a variety of hypotheses intended to explain
this disparity, opting ultimately for a learning bias favoring phonetically
natural constraints.
Features and syllable onsets
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Features, used for constructing all
constraints
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Onset list, used for maximal-onset syllabification.
Tab-delimited text file; open with a spreadsheet program
Training data
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Training data; edited version
of CMU database; forms selected have CELEX frequency >= 1
Grammar
Sound files
Data from the experimental participants