PhonMatrix: Visualizing co-occurrence constraints of sounds

Abstract

Abstract This paper describes the online tool PhonMatrix, which analyzes a word list with respect to the co-occurrence of sounds in a specified context within a word. The cooccurrence counts from the user-specified context are statistically analyzed according to a number of association measures that can be selected by the user. The statistical values then serve as the input for a matrix visualization where rows and columns represent the relevant sounds under investigation and the matrix cells indicate whether the respective ordered pair of sounds occurs more or less frequently than expected. The usefulness of the tool is demonstrated with three case studies that deal with vowel harmony and similar place avoidance patterns