The Organization of Lexicons: a Cross-Linguistic Analysis of Monosyllabic Words

Lexicons utilize a fraction of licit structures. Different theories predict either that lexicons prioritize contrastiveness or structural economy. Study 1 finds that the monosyllabic lexicon of Mandarin is no more distinctive than a randomly sampled baseline using the phonological inventory. Study 2 finds that the lexicons of Mandarin and American English have fewer phonotactically complex words than the random baseline: Words tend not to have multiple low-probability components. This suggests that phonological constraints can have superadditive penalties for combined violations, consistent with e.g. Albright (ms.)

The stability of segmental properties across genre and corpus types in low-resource languages

Are written corpora useful for phonological research? Word frequency lists for low-resource languages have become ubiquitous in recent years (Scannell, 2007). For many languages there is direct correspondence between their written forms and their alphabets, but it is not clear whether written corpora can adequately represent language use. We use 15 low-resource languages and compare several information-theoretic properties across three corpus types. We show that despite differences in origin and genre, estimates in one corpus are highly correlated with estimates in other corpora

Exploration and Exploitation of Victorian Science in Darwin's Reading Notebooks

Search in an environment with an uncertain distribution of resources involves a trade-off between exploitation of past discoveries and further exploration. This extends to information foraging, where a knowledge-seeker shifts between reading in depth and studying new domains. To study this decision-making process, we examine the reading choices made by one of the most celebrated scientists of the modern era: Charles Darwin. From the full-text of books listed in his chronologically-organized reading journals, we generate topic models to quantify his local (text-to-text) and global (text-to-past) reading decisions using Kullback-Liebler Divergence, a cognitively-validated, information-theoretic measure of relative surprise. Rather than a pattern of surprise-minimization, corresponding to a pure exploitation strategy, Darwin's behavior shifts from early exploitation to later exploration, seeking unusually high levels of cognitive surprise relative to previous eras. These shifts, detected by an unsupervised Bayesian model, correlate with major intellectual epochs of his career as identified both by qualitative scholarship and Darwin's own self-commentary. Our methods allow us to compare his consumption of texts with their publication order. We find Darwin's consumption more exploratory than the culture's production, suggesting that underneath gradual societal changes are the explorations of individual synthesis and discovery. Our quantitative methods advance the study of cognitive search through a framework for testing interactions between individual and collective behavior and between short- and long-term consumption choices. This novel application of topic modeling to characterize individual reading complements widespread studies of collective scientific behavior.Comment: Cognition pre-print, published February 2017; 22 pages, plus 17 pages supporting information, 7 pages reference

Changing word usage predicts changing word durations in New Zealand English

This paper investigates the emergence of lexicalized effects of word usage on word duration by looking at parallel changes in usage and duration over 130 years in New Zealand English. Previous research has found that frequent words are shorter, informative words are longer, and words in utterance-final position are also longer. It has also been argued that some of these patterns are not simply online adjustments, but are incorporated into lexical representations. While these studies tend to focus on the synchronic aspects of such patterns, our corpus shows that word-usage patterns and word durations are not static over time. Many words change in duration and also change with respect to frequency, informativity and likelihood of occurring utterance-finally. Analysis of changing word durations over this time period shows substantial patterns of co-adaptation between word usage and word durations. Words that are increasing in frequency are becoming shorter. Words that are increasing/decreasing in informativity show a change in the same direction in duration (e.g. increasing informativity is associated with increasing duration). And words that are increasingly appearing utterance-finally are lengthening. These effects exist independently of the local effects of the predictors. For example, words that are increasing utterance-finally lengthen in all positions, including utterance-medially. We show that these results are compatible with a number of different views about lexical representations, but they cannot be explained without reference to a production-perception loop that allows speakers to update their representations dynamically on the basis of their experience

The emergence of word-internal repetition through iterated learning:Explaining the mismatch between learning biases and language design

The idea that natural language is shaped by biases in learning plays a key role in our understanding of how human language is structured, but its corollary that there should be a correspondence between typological generalisations and ease of acquisition is not always supported. For example, natural languages tend to avoid close repetitions of consonants within a word, but developmental evidence suggests that, if anything, words containing sound repetitions are more, not less, likely to be acquired than those without. In this study, we use word-internal repetition as a test case to provide a cultural evolutionary explanation of when and how learning biases impact on language design. Two artificial language experiments showed that adult speakers possess a bias for both consonant and vowel repetitions when learning novel words, but the effects of this bias were observable in language transmission only when there was a relatively high learning pressure on the lexicon. Based on these results, we argue that whether the design of a language reflects biases in learning depends on the relative strength of pressures from learnability and communication efficiency exerted on the linguistic system during cultural transmission

Abstract Pre-parsing Efficiently- MA Thesis

This work tries to model human parsing by assuming that some part of the parsing process is designed to complete its work in linear complexity. This part of the parser, the pre-parser, produces underspecified structure of which the correct parse tree can be re-built by subsequent modules. I demonstrate how such an assumption predicts a range of complex processing difficulties phenomena such as garden path and right association, while assuming little else about the parser. i Acknowledgments I would like to thank my adviser, Fred Landman, whose guidance and wise criticism has led me through the mess of confused and confusing ideas that preceded this work. His precise observations, his devotion to the process, and most importantly his willingness to both accept and subdue my somewhat stubborn and alien approach to linguistics, have made this work possible. I would also like to thank my thesis committee, Susan Rothstein and Alexander Grosu for their invaluable remarks, and on their vital role in making this thesis readable to fello

The role of fast speech in sound change

Recent research has seen a surge in interest in the role of theindividual in sound change processes. Do fast speakers have aunique role in sound change processes? Fast speech leads togreater rates of lenition (reduction). But should it mean thatfast talkers would be more likely to lenite even when speak-ing slowly? In two corpus studies we show that even whenfast talkers speak more slowly they are (a) more likely to omitsegments and (b) more likely to perform variable reduction ofconsonants. This draws attention to habitual speech rate as alikely factor in the actuation of lenition processes

Schwa has an articulatory target in American English

Is American English schwa’s position determined solely by coarticulatory pressures? There is currently disagreement between articulation-based and acoustic-based studies (Browman and Goldstein 1994; Flemming 2009). In two acoustic corpus studies using the Switchboard and Buckeye corpora, we find that vowels head toward a central high vowel position when subject to increased coarticulatory pressures, rather than toward the position occupied by American English schwa. Even lexical schwa vowels shift to lower F1 values when their duration is relatively short. Our findings are consistent with schwa occupying a perceptually but not articulatorily neutral position. As such, they bear on vowel neutralization patterns, and suggest that unstressed syllables may convey specific information: that they are not stressed