Abstract In this paper, we highlight the role of typology in providing an empirical basis for explanation within Evolutionary Phonology with a focus on rare sound patterns and extra-phonetic explanation. Broad typological surveys or macro-typologies that include phonetic detail may, at once, support universal tendencies document patterns, offering arguments theories which based are emergent pro...

We present a model of gradient phonotactics that is shown to reduce overall phoneme uncertainty in language when the phonotactic grammar modularized an unsupervised fashion create more than one sub-grammar. Our recurrent neural network (Elman 1990), which, applied two separate, randomly initialized modules corpus Japanese words, learns lexical subdivisions closely correlate with main strata for...

In this paper, we introduce a new approach to dialect recognition that relies on context-dependent (CD) phonetic differences between dialects as well as phonotactics. Given a speech utterance, we obtain the phone sequence using a CD-phone recognizer. We then identify the most likely dialect of these CDphones using SVM classifiers. Augmenting these phones with the output of these classifiers, we...

The Dutch lexicon contains very few sequences of a long vowel followed by a consonant cluster, where the second member of the cluster is a non-coronal. We provide experimental evidence that Dutch speakers have implicit knowledge of this gap, which cannot be reduced to the probability of segmental sequences or to word-likeness as measured by neighborhood density. The experiment also suggests tha...

While Modern Standard Arabic is the formal spoken and written language of the Arab world, dialects are the major communication mode for everyday life; identifying a speaker’s dialect is thus critical to speech processing tasks such as automatic speech recognition, as well as speaker identification. We examine the role of prosodic features (intonation and rhythm) across four Arabic dialects: Gul...

Three experiments addressed the hypothesis that production factors constrain phonotactic learning in adult English speakers, and that this constraint gives rise to a markedness effect on learning. In Experiment 1, an acoustic measure was used to assess consonant–consonant coarticulation in naturally produced nonwords, which were then used as stimuli in a phonotactic learning experiment. Results...

This article argues that, contrary to some recent proposals, a given phonological form may be organised into at most one array of metrical structure at a time. The bulk of the paper is dedicated to a case study of Huariapano, a language that has been claimed to motivate multiple, coexisting but autonomous, layers of metrical parsing. I show that this conclusion is premature: both stress and seg...

Word frequency plays a role in reduction processes: high-frequency words undergo more reduction than low-frequency words. Pretonic schwa reduction in Dutch is susceptible to frequency effects in this way, but the well-formedness of the cluster that remains after schwa deletion also plays a role. An experiment shows that cluster well-formedness and frequency effects in fact interact with each ot...