Since Ramus et al. (1999) a number of statistical metrics have been routinely employed by researchers (Ramus 2003, Grabe & Low 2002 etc.) in an effort to rhythmically classify languages. However, recent studies by Arvaniti (2009), Tilsen & Arvaniti (2013), Arvaniti & Rodriquez (2013) etc., have challenged both the validity of these metrics in reflecting speech rhythm, and the physical measurabi...

Languages instantiate many different kinds of dependencies, holding between adjacent or nonadjacent elements. In the domain of phonotactics, while sensitivity to adjacent dependencies emerges between 6 and 10 months, it is unknown when sensitivity to nonadjacent dependencies emerges. The present study tests a perceptual equivalent of the Labial-Coronal (LC) bias, a dependency involving two non-...

The paper reports on an investigation of wordmedial consonant clusters in English. Medial clusters are further subdivided into phonotactic ones, i.e. intramorphemic, and morphonotactic ones, which are morphologically complex – arising as a result of derivation or compounding. In this study we concentrate on morphonotactic clusters. We put forward the following hypothesis: since compounds may ul...

Generative linguistics is predicated on a conceptual distinction between the lexicon and the grammar. However in practice, lexical and grammatical acquisition are interdependent: phonotactics are projected in part from the lexicon [17], while the underlying form of a morpheme depends on the pattern of contrast and neutralization determined by the grammar [25]. This paper demonstrates a causativ...

This paper deals with an approach to Automatic Language Identification using only prosodic modeling. The traditional approach for language identification focuses mainly on phonotactics because it gives the best results. Recent studies reveal that humans use different levels of perception to identify a language, in particular prosodic cues. Among prosodic features, rhythm is known to carry a sub...

This paper deals with an approach to Automatic Language Identification using only prosodic modeling. The actual approach for language identification focuses mainly on phonotactics because it gives the best results. We propose here to evaluate the relevance of prosodic information for language identification with read studio recording (previous experiment [1]) and spontaneous telephone speech. F...

This study explored sensitivity to word-level phonotactic patterns in English and Japanese monolingual infants. Infants at the ages of 6, 12, and 18 months were tested on their ability to discriminate between test words using a habituation-switch experimental paradigm. All of the test words, neek, neeks, and neekusu, are phonotactically legitimate for English, whereas the first two words are cr...

From a phonological point of view, morphological words, i.e. syntactic atoms, do not necessarily behave as a unit. For instance, derivational affixes and compound members can be treated independently by phonological word-level rules. The prosodic word has been defined in order to account for the non-isomorphy between morphology and phonology. Prosodic words are typically characterized as being ...

Ultrasound can be used to address unresolved questions in phonological theory. To date, some studies have shown that results from ultrasound imaging can shed light on how differences in phonological elements are implemented. Phenomena that have been investigated include transitional schwa, vowel coalescence, and transparent vowels. A study of consonant cluster phonotactics is presented as an ex...

We have established a phonotactic language model as the solution to spoken language identification (LID). In this framework, we define a single set of acoustic tokens to represent the acoustic activities in the world’s spoken languages. A voice tokenizer converts a spoken document into a text-like document of acoustic tokens. Thus a spoken document can be represented by a count vector of acoust...