Phonologists usually reserve the term gradience for the distinction between phonetics and phonology. Phonetics is gradient and phonology is categorical. But in recent years, phonotactic patterns have been found to be gradient both along frequency counts and grammaticality judgments (see for instance Pierrehumbert 2003, Frisch & Stearns, this volume, and Jurafsky 2003). This chapter addresses th...

Gradience is a concept that lies at the heart of phonetic and phonological variation change. This paper explores phenomenon nasalisation, process takes its origin in coarticulation that, as happened French, may lead to gradual development phonemic nasal vowels. We will discuss stages which this unfolded history French then zoom on Poitevin-Saintongeais region, where ancient vowel [ɛ̃jn] was reta...

The question of whether grammaticality is a binary categorical or a gradient property has been the subject of ongoing debate in linguistics and psychology for many years. Linguists have tended to use constructed examples to test speakers’ judgements on specific sorts of constraint violation. We applied machine translation to randomly selected subsets of the British National Corpus (BNC) to gene...

Taiwan Mandarin syllable contraction is a lenition process which involves the elision of the intervocalic segments and the merger of the tonal elements of two syllables. Trough depth is employed as the measure for gradience of syllable contraction in this study and the distribution of trough depth shows that syllable contraction is optional. In the perception experiment, listeners were asked to...

While connectionist models are ubiquitous in psycholinguistic approaches to language processing, they are less well-known as generative models of grammar. This work surveys a body of literature in which connectionist models have been developed to address problems central to generative phonology. The focus is on explaining to the newcomer precisely how these models work, and in particular how th...

1 Introduction In classical generative phonology, phonotactic constraints define the set of possible sound patterns in a given language by restricting the distribution of sounds, e.g. in certain structural positions or next to certain other sounds. Speakers' knowledge of the phonotactic constraints in their language is manifested in various linguistic tasks they perform. Speakers will judge a s...

This paper explores theoretical issues in constructing an adequate probabilistic semantics for natural language. Two approaches are contrasted. The first extends Montague Semantics with a probability distribution over models. It has nice theoretical properties, but does not account for the ubiquitous nature of ambiguity; moreover inference is NP-hard. An alternative approach is described in whi...