A computational model of phonotactic acquisition
Predictability of exceptional patterns in Hungarian
Ildikó Emese Szabó | New York University
This paper presents a model that connects phonotactic exceptionality to perceptibility, more specifically to functional load and acoustic detail. I identify two patterns in exceptionality: lexical exceptions and phonotactic vacillation, where the former is restricted to specific lexical items, while the latter affects two contrastive sound categories as a whole. Through the example of Hungarian word-final phonotactics, the Model of Perceptual Categorization associates these two patterns with different functional load and acoustic properties of contrasts, that lead to two categorizational malfunctions. On the one hand, phonotactic vacillation is a result of a frequent failure to categorize ambiguous tokens: low functional load coinciding with little acoustic difference. On the other hand, lexical exceptions are systematic categorizational mistakes brought about by salient categories – in this case distributional generalizations are hindered by interference from mislabeled tokens.
Keywords: functional load, phonotactics, exceptionality, Hungarian, perception
Published online: 21 January 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/lv.16011.sza
https://doi.org/10.1075/lv.16011.sza
References
References
Anttila, Arto
2002 Morphologically conditioned phonological alternations. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 20(1). 1–12. 
Blevins, Juliette & Andrew Wedel
2009 Inhibited Sound Change: An evolutionary approach to lexical competition. Diachronica 26(2). 143–183.
Boersma, Paul & Joe Pater
2016 Convergence properties of a gradual learning algorithm for Harmonic Grammar. In John McCarthy & Joe Pater (eds.), Harmonic grammar and harmonic serialism, London: Equinox Press.
Boersma, Paul & David Weenink
2010 Praat: doing phonetics by computer Computer program.
Bybee, Joan
2001 Phonology and language use, vol. 94. Cambridge University Press.
Cedergren, Henrietta J. & David Sankoff
1974 Variable rules: Performance as a statistical reflection of competence. Language 50(2). 333–355.
Chomsky, Noam & Morris Halle
1968 The Sound Pattern of English. New York: Harper & Row Publishers.
Clements, George N. & Elizabeth V. Hume
1995 The Internal Organization of Speech Sounds. In Goldsmith, John (ed.), The Handbook of Phonological Theory, 245–306. Cambridge Massachusetts: Blackwell.
Feldman, Naomi & Thomas L. Griffiths
2007 A rational account of the perceptual magnet effect. In Proceedings of the 29th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
Gervain, Judit & Jacques Mehler
2010 Speech perception and language acquisition in the first year of life. Annual review of psychology 61. 191–218.
Gouskova, Maria
2003 Deriving economy: Syncope in Optimality Theory: Graduate Linguistics Student Association, University of Massachusetts dissertation.
Halácsy, Péter, András Kornai, László Németh, András Rung, István Szakadát & Viktor Trón
2004 Creating open language resources for Hungarian In Proceedings of Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, 203–210.
Harris, John
1990 Segmental complexity and phonological government. Phonology 7(01). 255–300.
Hayes, Bruce
1995 Metrical stress theory: Principles and case studies. University of Chicago Press.
Hayes, Bruce, Kie Zuraw, Péter Siptár & Zsuzsa Cziráky Londe
2009 Natural and unnatural constraints in Hungarian vowel harmony. Language 85. 822–863.
Hockett, Charles Francis
1955 A manual of phonology. Waverly Press.
Itô, Junko & Armin Mester
1999 The Phonological Lexicon. In Natsuko Tsujimura (ed.), The Handbook of Japanese Linguistics, 62–100. Oxford: Blackwell.
Kaplan, Abby
2011 How much homophony is normal? Journal of linguistics 47(03). 631–671.
Kay, Paul
1978 Variable rules, community grammar, and linguistic change. In David Sankoff (ed.), Linguistic variation: Models and methods, 71–83. New York: Academic Press.
Kay, Paul & Chad K. McDaniel
1979 On the logic of variable rules. Language in society 8(2–3). 151–187.
Liberman, Alvin M., Katherine Safford Harris, Howard S. Hoffman & Belver C. Griffith
1957 The discrimination of speech sounds within and across phoneme boundaries. Journal of Experimental Psychology 54(5). 358–68.
Mády, Katalin
2010 Shortening of long high vowels in Hungarian: a perceptual loss? In Proceedings of Sociophonetics at the crossroads of speech variation, processing and communication, Pisa.
Mády, Katalin & Uwe D. Reichel
2007 Quantity distinction in the Hungarian vowel system – just theory or also reality? In Proceedings of International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, http://www.phonetik.uni-muenchen.de/~mady/#p_pub.
Martin, Andrew, Sharon Peperkamp & Emmanuel Dupoux
2013 Learning phonemes with a proto-lexicon. Cognitive Science 37(1). 103–124.
Martinet, André
1952 Function, structure, and sound change. Word 8(1). 1–32.
1968 Phonetics and linguistic evolution 464–487.
McCarthy, John J. & Alan Prince
1993 Generalized alignment. In Yearbook of morphology 1993, 79–153. Springer.
Mielke, Jeff
2008 The Emergence of Distinctive Features. Oxford University Press.
Nádasdy, Ádám & Péter Siptár
1994 A magánhangzók. In Kiefer Ferenc (ed.), Strukturális magyar nyelvtan, vol. 2. Fonológia, 42–182. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó.
Ohala, John J.
1981 The listener as a source of sound change. Papers from the Parasession on Language and Behavior 178–203.
1993 Sound change as nature’s speech perception experiment. Speech Communication 13(1). 155–161.
Pater, Joe
1994 Against the underlying specification of an ‘exceptional’ English stress pattern. Toronto Working Papers in Linguistics 13.
2000 Non-uniformity in English secondary stress: the role of ranked and lexically specific constraints. Phonology 17(2). 237–274.
2004 Exceptions in optimality theory: Typology and learnability. In Conference on Redefining Elicitation: Novel Data in Phonological Theory.
2009 Weighted constraints in generative linguistics. Cognitive Science 33(6). 999–1035.
Pierrehumbert, Janet
2001 Exemplar dynamics: Word frequency, lenition, and contrast. In Joan Bybee & Paul Hopper (eds.), Frequency effects and the emergence of lexical structure, 137–157. John Benjamins, Amsterdam.
Prince, Alan & Paul Smolensky
1993. 2004 Optimality Theory: Constraint interaction in generative grammar.
Pulleyblank, Douglas
2003 Covert Feature Effects. In WCCFL 22: Proceedings of the 22nd West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, vol. 22, 398–422.
Sankoff, David & William Labov
1979 On the uses of variable rules. Language in society 8(2–3). 189–222.
Siptár, Péter & Miklós Törkenczy
2000 The Phonology of Hungarian. The Phonology of the World’s languages. New York: Oxford University Press.
Steriade, Donca
1999 Phonetics in phonology: The case of laryngeal neutralization. In Matthew Gordon (ed.), Papers in Phonology, vol. 3 UCLA Working Papers in Linguistics 2, 25–146. Los Angeles: UCLA Department of Linguistics.
Studdert-Kennedy, Michael, Alvin Liberman, Katherine Harris & Franklin Cooper
1970 Motor theory of speech perception: a reply to Lane’s critical review. Psychological Review 77. 234–249.
Szabó, Ildikó Emese
2015 Phonotactics of word-final vowels – Predictability of exceptional patterns in Hungarian. Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest MA thesis.
Törkenczy, Miklós
2006 The Phonotactics of Hungarian: Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest Dsc dissertation.
Trubetzkoy, Nikolai
1939 Grundzüge der Phonologie. Prague. [Bd 7, der Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague.]. English transl. by C. Baltaxe (1969) Principles of phonology. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Wedel, Andrew
2004 Self-organization and categorical behavior in phonology: UC Santa Cruz dissertation.
Wedel, Andrew, Scott Jackson & Abby Kaplan
2013a Functional load and the lexicon: Evidence that syntactic category and frequency relationships in minimal lemma pairs predict the loss of phoneme contrasts in language change. Language and speech 56(3). 395–417.
Wedel, Andrew, Abby Kaplan & Scott Jackson
2013b High functional load inhibits phonological contrast loss: A corpus study. Cognition 128(2). 179–186.
Werker, Janet F. & Richard C. Tees
1984 Cross-language speech perception: Evidence for perceptual reorganization during the first year of life. Infant behavior and development 7(1). 49–63.
White, James, Megha Sundara, Yun Jung Kim & Adam J. Chong
2014 Infant learning of phonological alternations is biased by phonetic similarity. In Poster presentation at the 65th Workshop on Learning Biases in Natural and Artificial Language Acquisition at the Annual meeting of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain.
Zipf, George Kingsley
1949 Human Behaviour and the Principle of Least-Effort. Addison-Wesley, Reading.