This paper shows how a society of agents can self-organize a shared vocalization system that is discrete, combinatorial and has a form of primitive phonotactics, starting from holistic inarticulate vocalizations. The originality of the system is that: (1) it does not include any explicit pressure for communication; (2) agents do not possess capabilities of coordinated interactions, in particula...

1.1 Aims and background Australian languages are famous for their near-uniform phonemic inventories. Authors such as Busby (1980); Dixon (1980); Hamilton (1996); Dixon (2002); Butcher (2006), amongst others, have emphasized the similarity of phoneme inventories across the continent, using it as evidence of intensive lexical diffusion and linguistic convergence (Dixon 1997, Dixon 2002:547). Cros...

The problem of the acquisition of Phonotactics in OT is shown to be not tractable in its strong formulation, whereby constraints and generating function vary arbitrarily as inputs of the problem. Tesar and Smolensky (1998) consider the basic ranking problem in Optimality Theory (OT). According to this problem, the learner needs to find a ranking consistent with a given set of data. They show th...

In this study four statistical grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) conversion methods for canonical German are compared. The G2P models differ in terms of usage of morphologic information and of phoneme history (left context) information. In order to evaluate our models we introduce two measures, namely mean normalized Levenshtein distance for classification accuracy and conditional relative entropy for ...

Do Cantonese listeners really use phonotactics information in the segmentation process of Cantonese continuous speech? Because some phoneme transitions across Cantonese syllables occur much more often than the others, the transitional probability may cue the locations of possible syllable boundaries in Cantonese speech. Two syllable-spotting experiments were conducted. Results clearly indicated...

Individual differences in cognitive processing style have recently been hypothesized as an important source of systematic variability in speech processing. This study offers further evidence in support of this hypothesis by showing that variability in cognitive processing style, as measured by differences in working memory capacity and “autistic” traits, significantly influences listeners’ resp...

This study investigates the notion of perceptual distance among the Afro-Asiatic family. It is based on a “same/different” task involving French subjects and items from 10 languages or dialects (8 Afro-Asiatic: Amharic, Moroccan Arabic, Jordanian Arabic, Tarifit Berber, Touareg Berber, Hausa, Hebrew, Somali and 2 intruders: Armenian and Turkish). The task was judged very difficult by the subjec...

This paper deals with an approach to Automatic Language Identification based on rhythmic modeling. Beside phonetics and phonotactics, rhythm is actually one of the most promising features to be considered for language identification, but significant problems are unresolved for its modeling. In this paper, an algorithm of rhythm extraction is described. Experiments are performed on read speech f...