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Variability in obligatory contour principle effects
... Analogous constraints that apply to repeated laryngeal features rather than repeated place features are also attested across unrelated languages such as Sanskrit, Hausa, and Souletin Basque (MacEachern 1999). Further, in cases where lexical patterns have been analysed statistically, the co-occurrence patterns are gradient and quantitatively depend on similarity (Berkley 1995(Berkley , 2000Buckley 1997;Frisch 1996;Pierrehumbert 1993). ...
... Placebased consonant co-occurrence constraints are prevalent in the Semitic languages (Bender and Fulass 1978;Buckley 1997;Greenberg 1950;Hayward and Hayward 1989;Koskinen 1964). They have also been found in unrelated languages, including Hawaiian and Serbo-Croatian (MacKay 1970), Ngbaka (Broe 1995), English (Berkley 1995;Frisch 1996), French (Plenat 1996), Italian (Frisch, Pierrehumbert, and Broe in press), Javanese (Mester 1986), Russian (Padgett 1992), and other languages (Yip 1989). Across languages, there appear to be differences in the details of the co-occurrence restrictions for homorganic consonants. ...
... In the other languages that have been examined statistically for OCP-Place effects, gradient patterns of co-occurrence have also been found (Berkley 1995(Berkley , 2000Buckley 1997;Frisch, Pierrehumbert, and Broe in press). In each of these cases, similar homorganic consonant pairs are found to be more restricted than dissimilar homorganic consonant pairs, and distance between the consonants reduces the influence of similarity. ...
Introduction The Arabic verbal roots are subject to a long-distance phonotactic constraint that is well known for its implications for autosegmental representation (McCarthy 1986, 1988, 1994). In this constraint, originally proposed as an instantiation of the Obligatory Contour Principle (Goldsmith 1979), repeated place of articulation features are not allowed within a root. Subsequent research has shown that the details of consonant occurrence in the Arabic roots are complex, with the strength of the phonotactic restriction gradiently dependent on the similarity of the consonants involved, the presence of intervening segments, and the contrasts available in the segmental inventory of Arabic (Pierrehumbert 1993; Frisch, Pierrehumbert, and Broe 2004). The gradience of the phonotactic patterns in the Arabic lexicon provide strong evidence for a functional phonetic motivation for the constraint. The similarity avoidance constraint in Arabic is quantitatively dependent on similarity, distance between segments, segment frequency, and segmental position in the word. No formal model that prohibits feature co-occurrence like the autosegmental OCP can capture the richness of the patterning. However, a wide range of evidence from psycholinguistics suggests that processing a sequence of similar items is more difficult than processing a sequence of dissimilar items. Thus, we can account for the presence of similarity avoidance constraints in the phonotactics of Arabic as a consequence of functional pressure to make language processing as easy as possible. I claim that the richness of phonotactic patterns directly (quantitatively) reflects the functional explanation. In this way, statistical analysis of the lexicon provides a novel type of evidence for functionally motivated constraints and rules out alternative formal explanations (see Hawkins 1994 for similar arguments at the syntactic level).
... Evidence of distance--related gradience has also been found in the English lexicon. Berkley (2000) reports that pairs of similar consonants near one another are not found as often as would be predicted by chance alone in English and Latin words. She refers to this as the OCP effect, and finds that it is most evident when the consonants in question are separated by a single vowel and becomes less pronounced as additional segments intervene. ...
... Like Berkley (2000), Martin performed an analysis in order to determine how best to calculate distance in Navajo, and found a statistically significant difference in assimilation rates between sibilants separated by the same number of segments but by different syllabification. For two sibilants separated by three intervening segments, those in adjacent syllables agreed with regards to anteriority 72% of the time while those in nonadjacent syllables agreed 27% of the time (p. ...
... In a review of various experimental approaches commonly used in research focused on speech perception, Sendlmeier (1995) determined that while listeners are able to shift their focus to smaller or larger units depending on the task at hand, "as a default case, the syllable serves as the primary perceptual unit" (131). This is a nice complement to the syllable--based measure of distance supported by the findings discussed in Section 1.3.1 (Berkley 2000, Martin 2005. Additionally, some syllables are more salient than others; Sendlmeier (1987) found that syllables in word onset position and stressed syllables were of particular significance in a nonword similarity task-which, as noted by Frisch (2000), is a task that shares many similarities with the nonword grammaticality judgment tasks discussed previously. ...
... Gradient similarity avoidance effects have been identified in English monosyllabic words. Berkley (2000) investigated words of the structure C 1 VC 2 and discovered that words in which the two C slots are occupied by homorganic consonants are significantly underrepresented in the lexicon. That is, the number of such words is lower than would be expected if the consonant combinations were purely random. ...
Previous research on similarity avoidance has focused on such phonological factors as featural similarity and adjacency. This paper additionally investigates the phonology-morphology interface and draws attention to morphological and lexical effects of similarity avoidance. Avoidance of identical or similar sounds may give rise to a variety of strategies, including periphrastic category formation, an unexpected allomorph of the stem or affix and a lexical gap. It is argued that, although similarity avoidance has a universal basis in language processing, the various strategies to implement it are construction specific. In particular, it is shown that one construction may exhibit a different scope of OCP effects than another, which entails that the constraints regulating OCP effects should be morphosyntactically indexed, in turn requiring reference to multiple cophonologies with distinct properties. A novel finding is that cophonologies may be delimited by the syntactic category of the base of category formation. Drawing on the insight of Construction Morphology, the analysis represents dissimilation as an interaction of construction-specific OCP constraints with schemas that include reference to the base. In order to derive the gradience of OCP effects, the relevant constraints are ranked on the basis of a similarity metric and formal complexity. The proposed constraint-based analysis aims to represent the construction-specific strategies for dealing with dissimilation and capture the observed gradience of the pressure.
... 본 연구에서는 음성 산출 실험을 실시하고 동일성 회피 제약에 따른 음성 적 효과에 집중하고자 한다. 4) 다른 위치 자질에서 보다 치경 위치 자질에서는 비교적 OCP 제약이 약하다(Berkley, 2000;Coetzee & Pater, 2006).일즈에서 말하는 Aberystwyth 영어에서도 C h VC h 에서 두 번째 기식성 자질이 상당히 줄어든다(Jatteau & Hejná, 2016: 361). ...
... A long line of research has shown that the triliteral verbal roots of Arabic reflect a dissimilarity constraint between homorganic consonants, known as OCP-Place (Greenberg, 1950;McCarthy, 1994;Pierrehumbert, 1993). This constraint has been found in many other languages (Koskinen, 1964;Bender & Fulass, 1978;Mester, 1986;Hayward & Hayward, 1989;Yip, 1989;Buckley, 1993;Berkley, 1994;Broe, 1995;Padgett, 1995). In Arabic, these cooccurrence restrictions apply to both the adjacent consonant pairs in the root (C1C2 and C2C3) as well as to the non-adjacent consonant pair (C1C3). ...
... A number of recent works have taken advantage of this similarity to interpret variable results in an OT framework. Although we are encouraged by this convergence of approaches, we note that, in works such as Berkley (1994) and Guy (1994), the OT model becomes problematic for a gradient OCP constraint sensitive to partial featural similarities, such as the one proposed here. ...
English coronal stop deletion is constrained by the preceding segment, so that stops and sibilants favor deletion more than liquids and nonsibilant fricatives. Previous explanations of this constraint (e.g., the sonority hierarchy) have failed to account for the details, but we show that it can be comprehensively treated as a consequence of the obligatory contour principle (OCP). The OCP, introduced to account for a variety of categorical constraints against adjacent identical tones, segments, and so forth, can be generalized as a universal disfavoring of sequences of like features: *[αF] [αF]. Therefore, coronal stop deletion, which targets the set of segments /t, d/ defined by the features [−son, −cont, +cor], is favored when the preceding segment shares any of these features. But this requires adopting the assumption of inherent variability and interpreting the OCP as a probabilistic constraint with cumulative effects (the more shared features, the greater likelihood of deletion). This suggests an attractive theoretical integration of categorical and variable processes in the grammar.
Statistical learning is often taken to lie at the heart of many cognitive tasks, including the acquisition of language. One particular task in which probabilistic models have achieved considerable success is the segmentation of speech into words. However, these models have mostly been tested against English data, and as a result little is known about how a statistical learning mechanism copes with input regularities that arise from the structural properties of different languages. This study focuses on statistical word segmentation in Arabic, a Semitic language in which words are built around consonantal roots. We hypothesize that segmentation in such languages is facilitated by tracking consonant distributions independently from intervening vowels. Previous studies have shown that human learners can track consonant probabilities across intervening vowels in artificial languages, but it is unknown to what extent this ability would be beneficial in the segmentation of natural language. We assessed the performance of a Bayesian segmentation model on English and Arabic, comparing consonant-only representations with full representations. In addition, we examined to what extent structurally different proto-lexicons reflect adult language. The results suggest that for a child learning a Semitic language, separating consonants from vowels is beneficial for segmentation. These findings indicate that probabilistic models require appropriate linguistic representations in order to effectively meet the challenges of language acquisition.
In this paper, I provide a unified account of three frequency effects in phonology. First, typologically marked elements are underrepresented. Second, phonological changes are underrepresented. Third, morphologically conditioned phonological changes are overrepresented. These effects are demonstrated with corpus data from English and Welsh. I show how all three effects follow from a simple conception of phonological complexity. Further, I demonstrate how this notion of complexity makes predictions about other phenomena in these languages, and that these predictions are borne out. I model this with traditional Optimality Theory, but the proposal is consistent with any constraint-based formalism that weights constraints in some way.
In this thesis we will analyse phonological phenomena which involve nuclear positions in Brazilian Portuguese. The theory of Charm and Government is the framework on which our analysis is based. We will discuss the distribution of Brazilian Portuguese vowels with respect to the primary stressed position which, we propose, is subject to charm constraints imposed on nuclear segments. Emphasis is placed on analysing vowel coalescence in Brazilian Portuguese. Specifically, we will consider phonological processes which involve vowel-
glide alternations. We will argue that whether a high vowel alternates or fails to alternate with its corresponding glide depends on the governing relations that adjacent nuclear positions contract with each other.
Our analysis aims not only to.provide a general account for the occurrence of high vowels and glides, but also to determine how glides are phonologically interpreted in Brazilian Portuguese.
The internal structure of the syllable has been a matter of long-standing debate. Some theories propose a highly articulated tree structure whose topmost constituents are the onset and the rhyme. However, much recent work in phonological theory has adopted a flatter model in which neither the onset nor the rhyme constitutes a constituent.
Experiments using the novel word game paradigm developed in Treiman (1983) have been interpreted as supporting the onset-rhyme model. Here we present new results using this paradigm. Subjects learned to insert infixes into simple monosyllabic words, and then extended the infixation to more complex forms including longer words with variable stress placement. The results are interpreted in the light of findings about morphophonemic processes occurring in natural language. Our model draws on the concept of template mapping, adapted from the literature on prosodic morphology. The patterns observed in the data are better modeled by mapping onto output templates than by any derivational rule referring to onset-rhyme constituency. Though the output templates do include prosodic detail, the level of detail available in flat models of the syllable is sufficient to explain the results. A critical appraisal of these results in relation to other results in the literature leads us to reject the onsetrhyme model.
This thesis investigates the factors influencing the adaptation of foreign words to
English, beyond traditional phonological parameters such as sonority distance. The
data examined were produced in an on-line adaptation task to study purely linguistic
rather than orthographic or historical influences. The adapted words contain
only lesser-studied phonotactic problems rather than segmental ill-formedness. The
choice of Russian as a donor and English as a borrowing language allow the study
of adaptations in a setting which allows a further strategy of alteration of ill-formed
consonant clusters beyond vowel epenthesis and consonant deletion, namely the
substitution of segments to change one cluster into another. In contrast to previous
research, English production of Russian stimuli with initial consonant clusters
showed that segment change is applied frequently, comparable to the amount of
vowel epenthesis. Extensive variation was observed, both in ratio of successful
production, and in the choice and distribution of adaptation strategy.
The factors in adaptation investigated were the sonority distance of the foreign
clusters, as well as concepts which have received much recent attention within
phonology, namely gradient grammaticality, similarity and frequency: English native
speaker judgments were collected about the perceived grammaticality of foreign
clusters and the similarity between targets and adaptations, while the frequency of
possible adaptations in English was calculated from a corpus of spoken English. Results
show that sonority cannot explain the variation in adaptation. Furthermore,
frequency has no influence on the choice of adaptation; however, higher perceived
badness results in a higher percentage of adaptations, and perceived similarity is
decisive for the choice of adaptations. A comparison of similarity judgments of English
and Russian listeners suggested that, in keeping with Steriade (2001), there
are some cross-linguistically corresponding rankings of similarity; however, differences
between languages due to phonotactics and phonetic detail were also found.
In summary, the experiment results suggest that the adaptation of loanwords occurs
in both in perception and production; furthermore, it is determined both by
L1 specifics and cross-linguistic tendencies, an thus neither a straightforward application
of L1 phonology nor completely independent of language background.
22.1 Preliminaries The terms 'variation' and 'optionality' in phonology describe a situation where one phonological input has more than one output. 1 Consider the following examples from American English and South-Eastern Finnish. In both cases, variation results from the optional application of one or more phonological processes. (1) (a) wEst saId (b) lentä-i wEst saId wEs saId lénti lénsi lént léns 'west side' 'fly-PAST' In (1a), a coronal stop is variably deleted at the edge of a complex coda (t/d-deletion) (Labov 1997). In (1b), we have two variable processes working together: /t/ becomes [s] before [i] (Assibilation) and /i/ is deleted in an unstressed syllable (Apocope). This yields four logically possible outcomes, all attested (Laalo 1988). Before embarking upon the discussion, it will be useful to draw some pre-theoretical distinctions. First, variation may occur within an individual (the same individual uses different forms at different times) or across individuals (different individuals use different forms). Second, variation may be free or contextually conditioned. Contextual conditions are usually divided into internal and external factors. Internal factors may be phonological, such as stress, syllable structure, foot structure, or segment quality, or they may be morphosyntactic, such as part of speech, morpheme type, or morphosyntactic domain. External factors include age, gender, style, register, identity, ethnicity, social class, and target audience. Third, contextual conditioning may be categorical or quantitative. In the first case, the occurrence of a variant is completely predictable from the context − i.e. we have a 'rule'. In the second case, the occurrence of a variant is not completely predictable, but there is a systematic quantitative pattern − i.e. we have a 'tendency'. Variation and optionality are pervasive in the phonologies of natural languages and for this reason optional rules have always been part of the generative phonologist's descriptive toolbox (Chomsky and Halle 1968). It is much less clear how to go beyond pure optionality. One view holds that quantitative regularities have no place in the theory 1 I thank Andries Coetzee, Paul de Lacy, and Kate Ketner for helpful comments. All errors are mine. Arto Anttila 2 of linguistic competence, but belong to the theory of performance (see e.g. Newmeyer 2003) and in practice quantitative aspects of phonological variation have been studied mainly by sociolinguists and phoneticians. There are two observations that are in a deep conflict with this view. First, categorical and quantitative regularities are often conditioned by the same grammatical factors. If the phonological grammar simply delivers the phonologically possible forms, it follows that any quantitative regularities must be explained by external factors, but in reality such regularities often refer to the grammar. Second, phonological variation may involve morphological and lexical conditioning and phonologically conditioned allomorph selection. This means that variation and quantitative regularities are potentially present at every level of phonology and cannot be reduced to 'low-level' phonology or phonetics. We conclude that a satisfactory theory of phonology must be able to provide an explicit theoretical interpretation for variable and quantitative regularities and show how such regularities relate to the more familiar invariant and categorical ones. The main goal of this chapter is to give a brief overview of three current approaches to phonological variation. All these approaches assume some version of Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993/2004, henceforth P&S 1993). 2 For other brief overviews that complement the picture given here, see especially Sankoff (1988) and Pierrehumbert (2003). The examples have been kept simple in the interest of conceptual clarity. For more detailed analyses, including several examples of quantitative modelling of phonological variation in large naturalistic corpora, the reader is referred to the work listed in the bibliography.
In describing the phonotactics (patterning of phonemes) of English syllables, linguists have focused on absolute restrictions concerning which phonemes may occupy which slots of the syllable. To determine whether probabilistic patterns also exist, we analyzed the distributions of phonemes in a reasonably comprehensive list of uninflected English CVC (consonant–vowel–consonant) words, some 2001 words in all. The results showed that there is a significant connection between the vowel and the following consonant (coda), with certain vowel–coda combinations being more frequent than expected by chance. In contrast, we did not find significant associations between the initial consonant (onset) and the vowel. These findings support the idea that English CVC syllables are composed of an onset and a vowel–coda rime. Implications for lexical processing are discussed.
This article examines the role of distinctness between adjacent segments in consonant deletion. On the basis of five stop-deletion patterns, it establishes a correlation between the likelihood of cluster simplification and the level of similarity between the consonants in the cluster. This correlation is motivated on perceptual grounds, and an OT analysis of similarity avoidance is provided in which perceptual factors are integrated in the grammar through both faithfulness and markedness constraints. This perceptual approach improves in two ways on previous analyses, notably the OCP. First, it integrates similarity avoidance within a more general perception-based framework, which accounts naturally for its gradient nature. Second, it uncovers a distinction between absolute and contextual similarity avoidance between adjacent segments, depending on whether similarity avoidance is established without reference to the context in which the segments appear or relative to the quality of the perceptual cues available to the segments.
This article summarizes the results of two experiments that use artificial grammar learning in order to test proposed phonological universals. The first universal involves limits on precedence-modification in phonological representations, drawn from a typology of ludlings (language games). It is found that certain unattested precedence-modifying operations in ludlings are also dispreferred in learning in experimental studies, suggesting that the typological gap reflects a principled and universal aspect of language structure. The second universal involves differences between vowels and consonants, and in particular, the fact that phonological typology finds vowel repetition and harmony to be widespread, while consonants are more likely to dissimilate. An artificial grammar task replicates this bias in the laboratory, suggesting that its presence in natural languages is not due to historical accident but to cognitive constraints on the form of linguistic grammars.
This paper documents a restriction against the co-occurrence of homorganic consonants in the root morphemes of Muna, a western
Austronesian language, and compares the Muna pattern with the much-studied similar pattern in Arabic. As in Arabic, the restriction
applies gradiently: its force depends on the place of articulation of the consonants involved, and on whether the homorganic
consonants are similar in terms of other features. Muna differs from Arabic in the relative strengths of these other features
in affecting co-occurrence rates of homorganic consonants. Along with the descriptions of these patterns, this paper presents
phonological analyses in terms of weighted constraints, as in Harmonic Grammar. This account uses a gradual learning algorithm
that acquires weights that reflect the relative frequency of different sequence types in the two languages. The resulting
grammars assign the sequences acceptability scores that correlate with a measure of their attestedness in the lexicon. This
application of Harmonic Grammar illustrates its ability to capture both gradient and categorical patterns.
Lexical items can be more or less well-formed depending on the phoneme combinations they contain. This phenomenon is called
gradient phonotactics. We propose an approach to gradient phonotactics based on Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993/2004). At the heart of the proposal is the Complexity Hypothesis that attributes the relative well-formedness of a lexical item
to its relative grammatical complexity measured in terms of ranking information: the more complex the lexical item, the less
well-formed it is. The theory orders linguistic structures in an implicational hierarchy that reflects their relative well-formedness.
Some implications are universal; others depend on language-specific rankings. The Complexity Hypothesis is supported by phonotactic
data from Muna (Austronesian) as recently analyzed by Coetzee and Pater (2008).
Alternations that are partly phonologically, partlymorphologically conditioned are a central problem in phonologicaltheory. In Optimality Theory, two types of solutions have beenproposed: morphologically specialized phonological constraints(interface constraints) and different constraint rankings fordifferent morphological categories (cophonologies). This paperpresents empirical evidence that distinguishes between these twohypotheses. Stem-final vowel alternations in Finnish are governed by amixed set of conditions that range from purely phonological tomorphological and lexical, from iron-clad exceptionless regularitiesto quantitative tendencies. Using a standard dictionary as the database, we show that phonological conditioning plays the dominant role,but in cases where phonology underdetermines the output, morphologicalconditioning may emerge. We then show that partial ordering ofconstraints, commonly used to model variation, extends tomorphological conditioning as well. The partial ordering model is arestrictive version of the cophonology model, which is thus supported.
Voice response time (RT) measurements from 4 large-scale studies of oral reading of English monosyllables were analyzed for evidence that voice key measurements are biased by the leading phonemes of the response. Words with different initial phonemes did have significantly different RTs. This effect persisted after contributions of nine covariables, such as frequency, length, and spelling consistency, were factored out, as well as when variance associated with error rate was factored out. A breakdown by phoneme showed that voiceless, posterior, and obstruent consonants were detected later than others. The second phonemes of the words also had an effect on RT: Words with high or front vowels were detected later. Phoneme-based biases due to voice keys were large (range about 100 ms) and pervasive enough to cause concern in interpreting voice RT measurements. Techniques are discussed for minimizing the impact of these biases.
How are violations of phonological constraints processed in word comprehension? The present article reports the results of an event-related potentials (ERP) study on a phonological constraint of German that disallows identical segments within a syllable or word (CC(i)VC(i)). We examined three types of monosyllabic late positive CCVC words: (a) existing words [see text], (b) wellformed novel words [see text] and component (c) illformed novel words [see text] as instances of Obligatory Contour Principle non-word (OCP) violations. Wellformed and illformed novel words evoked an N400 effect processing in comparison to existing words. In addition, illformed words produced an enhanced late posterior positivity effect compared to wellformed novel words. obligatory contour Our findings support the well-known observation that novel words evoke principle higher costs in lexical integration (reflected by N400 effects). Crucially, modulations of a late positive component (LPC) show that violations of phonological phonotactic constraints influence later stages of cognitive processing even constraints when stimuli have already been detected as non-existing. Thus, the comparison of electrophysiological effects evoked by the two types of non-existing words reveals the stages at which phonologically based structural wellformedness comes into play during word processing.
Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 2000. Includes bibliographical references (p. [309]-345). by Marie-Hélène Côté. Ph.D.
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