Words cluster phonetically beyond phonotactic regularities
Recent evidence suggests that cognitive pressures associated with language acquisition and use could affect the organization of the lexicon. On one hand, consistent with noisy channel models of language (e.g., Levy, 2008), the phonological distance between wordforms should be maximized to avoid perc...
| Main Authors: | , , , , |
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| Other Authors: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | en_US |
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Elsevier
2018
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| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/115884 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9786-8716 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5912-883X |
| _version_ | 1826202147606233088 |
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| author | Dautriche, Isabelle Christophe, Anne Piantadosi, Steven T. Mahowald, Kyle Adam Gibson, Edward A |
| author2 | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences |
| author_facet | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences Dautriche, Isabelle Christophe, Anne Piantadosi, Steven T. Mahowald, Kyle Adam Gibson, Edward A |
| author_sort | Dautriche, Isabelle |
| collection | MIT |
| description | Recent evidence suggests that cognitive pressures associated with language acquisition and use could affect the organization of the lexicon. On one hand, consistent with noisy channel models of language (e.g., Levy, 2008), the phonological distance between wordforms should be maximized to avoid perceptual confusability (a pressure for dispersion). On the other hand, a lexicon with high phonological regularity would be simpler to learn, remember and produce (e.g., Monaghan et al., 2011) (a pressure for clumpiness). Here we investigate wordform similarity in the lexicon, using measures of word distance (e.g., phonological neighborhood density) to ask whether there is evidence for dispersion or clumpiness of wordforms in the lexicon. We develop a novel method to compare lexicons to phonotactically-controlled baselines that provide a null hypothesis for how clumpy or sparse wordforms would be as the result of only phonotactics. Results for four languages, Dutch, English, German and French, show that the space of monomorphemic wordforms is clumpier than what would be expected by the best chance model according to a wide variety of measures: minimal pairs, average Levenshtein distance and several network properties. This suggests a fundamental drive for regularity in the lexicon that conflicts with the pressure for words to be as phonologically distinct as possible. Keywords: Linguistics; Lexical design; Communication;
Phonotactics |
| first_indexed | 2024-09-23T12:02:37Z |
| format | Article |
| id | mit-1721.1/115884 |
| institution | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| language | en_US |
| last_indexed | 2024-09-23T12:02:37Z |
| publishDate | 2018 |
| publisher | Elsevier |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | mit-1721.1/1158842022-10-01T07:49:46Z Words cluster phonetically beyond phonotactic regularities Dautriche, Isabelle Christophe, Anne Piantadosi, Steven T. Mahowald, Kyle Adam Gibson, Edward A Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences Gibson, Edward Mahowald, Kyle Adam Gibson, Edward A Recent evidence suggests that cognitive pressures associated with language acquisition and use could affect the organization of the lexicon. On one hand, consistent with noisy channel models of language (e.g., Levy, 2008), the phonological distance between wordforms should be maximized to avoid perceptual confusability (a pressure for dispersion). On the other hand, a lexicon with high phonological regularity would be simpler to learn, remember and produce (e.g., Monaghan et al., 2011) (a pressure for clumpiness). Here we investigate wordform similarity in the lexicon, using measures of word distance (e.g., phonological neighborhood density) to ask whether there is evidence for dispersion or clumpiness of wordforms in the lexicon. We develop a novel method to compare lexicons to phonotactically-controlled baselines that provide a null hypothesis for how clumpy or sparse wordforms would be as the result of only phonotactics. Results for four languages, Dutch, English, German and French, show that the space of monomorphemic wordforms is clumpier than what would be expected by the best chance model according to a wide variety of measures: minimal pairs, average Levenshtein distance and several network properties. This suggests a fundamental drive for regularity in the lexicon that conflicts with the pressure for words to be as phonologically distinct as possible. Keywords: Linguistics; Lexical design; Communication; Phonotactics 2018-05-25T13:23:35Z 2018-05-25T13:23:35Z 2017-03 2017-01 Article http://purl.org/eprint/type/JournalArticle 0010-0277 http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/115884 Dautriche, Isabelle et al. “Words Cluster Phonetically Beyond Phonotactic Regularities.” Cognition 163 (June 2017): 128–145 © 2017 Elsevier B.V. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9786-8716 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5912-883X en_US https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2017.02.001 Cognition Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ application/pdf Elsevier Prof. Gibson via Courtney Crummett |
| spellingShingle | Dautriche, Isabelle Christophe, Anne Piantadosi, Steven T. Mahowald, Kyle Adam Gibson, Edward A Words cluster phonetically beyond phonotactic regularities |
| title | Words cluster phonetically beyond phonotactic regularities |
| title_full | Words cluster phonetically beyond phonotactic regularities |
| title_fullStr | Words cluster phonetically beyond phonotactic regularities |
| title_full_unstemmed | Words cluster phonetically beyond phonotactic regularities |
| title_short | Words cluster phonetically beyond phonotactic regularities |
| title_sort | words cluster phonetically beyond phonotactic regularities |
| url | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/115884 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9786-8716 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5912-883X |
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