Feature economy in natural, random, and synthetic inventories

Mackie, Scott; Mielke, Jeff

doi:10.1075/lfab.6.03mac

Cited by 10 publications

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“…Martinet's claim that economy characterizes the historical trajectory of language change predicts a typological tendency toward greater economy in inventories. A typological investigation by Clements ( 2003 ) corroborated this within small subsets of consonant inventories, and a more systematic study by Mackie and Mielke ( 2011 ) demonstrated greater than chance economy in a large number of languages, across the whole inventory (consonants and vowels together).…”

Section: Characterizing Inventory Geometriesmentioning

confidence: 84%

“…It is a slight adaptation of one of the six feature systems used by Mielke et al ( 2011 ) (in turn a small adaptation of the feature system of Halle and Clements, 1983 ), showing that the representation is good at describing sets of sounds that commonly occur in the sound patterns of the world's languages. It is very similar to, but not exactly the same as, the system (Chomsky and Halle, 1968 ) used by Mackie and Mielke ( 2011 ) to show robust effects of economy in natural inventories in the same database we use here (see below under Study 1: Materials and Methods ; the full table for all the sounds appearing in the natural inventories in our sample is given in the Supplementary Materials).…”

Section: Characterizing Inventory Geometriesmentioning

confidence: 86%

“…To generate a set of random control inventories, we used the same procedure as Mackie and Mielke ( 2011 ). We first calculated the overall frequency of all 688 feature combinations in the sample.…”

Section: Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Geometric Constraints on Human Speech Sound Inventories

Dunbar

Dupoux

2016

Front. Psychol.

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We investigate the idea that the languages of the world have developed coherent sound systems in which having one sound increases or decreases the chances of having certain other sounds, depending on shared properties of those sounds. We investigate the geometries of sound systems that are defined by the inherent properties of sounds. We document three typological tendencies in sound system geometries: economy, a tendency for the differences between sounds in a system to be definable on a relatively small number of independent dimensions; local symmetry, a tendency for sound systems to have relatively large numbers of pairs of sounds that differ only on one dimension; and global symmetry, a tendency for sound systems to be relatively balanced. The finding of economy corroborates previous results; the two symmetry properties have not been previously documented. We also investigate the relation between the typology of inventory geometries and the typology of individual sounds, showing that the frequency distribution with which individual sounds occur across languages works in favor of both local and global symmetry.

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Section: Characterizing Inventory Geometriesmentioning

confidence: 84%

Section: Characterizing Inventory Geometriesmentioning

confidence: 86%

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Geometric Constraints on Human Speech Sound Inventories

Dunbar

Dupoux

2016

Front. Psychol.

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“…And do those frequencies differ from those we would expect in the absence of specific complexity biases in the learner? This question leads to the theoretical problem of what the appropriate chance model is (Mackie and Mielke 2011).…”

Section: 4 Structurally Biased Phonologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Structure and Substance in Artificial‐Phonology Learning, Part II: Substance

Moreton

Pater

2012

Language and Linguist. Compass

102

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Artificial analogues of natural-language phonological patterns can often be learned in the lab from small amounts of training or exposure. The difficulty of a featurallydefined pattern has been hypothesized to be affected by two main factors, its formal structure (the abstract logical relationships between the defining features) and its phonetic substance (the concrete phonetic interpretation of the pattern). This paper, the second of a two-part series, reviews the experimental literature on phonetic substance, which is hypothesized to facilitate the acquisition of phonological patterns that resemble naturally-occurring phonetic patterns. The effects of phonetic substance on pattern learning turn out to be elusive and unreliable in comparison with the robust effects of formal complexity (reviewed in Part I). If natural-language acquisition is guided by the same inductive biases as are found in the lab, these results support a theory in which inductive bias shapes only the form, and channel bias shapes the content, of the sound patterns of the worlds languages.

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“…the high rate of occurrence of [s]), it is clear that phonetic distance is not the whole story, because inventories typically involve fewer than the maximum number of phonetic dimensions, such that what is needed is a hierarchy of segment salience plus a hierarchy of contrast salience. The non-maximal utilization of phonetic dimensions has been explored under the guise of feature economy by Clements (2003Clements ( , 2009) and Mackie & Mielke (2011). Hall (2011) proposes a phonological contrast-based account of vowel system dispersedness.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Visualizing phonetic segment frequencies with density-equalizing maps

Mielke¹

2017

Journal of the International Phonetic Association

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A method is demonstrated for creating density-equalizing maps of IPA consonant and vowel charts, where the size of a cell in the chart reflects information such as the crosslinguistic frequency of the consonant or vowel. Transforming the IPA charts in such a way allows the visualization of interactions between phonetic features. Density-equalizing maps are used to illustrate a range of facts about consonant and vowel inventories, including the frequency of consonants and vowels and the frequency of common diacritics, and to illustrate the frequency of deletion and epenthesis involving particular consonants and vowels. Solutions are proposed for issues involving genealogical sampling, counting pairs of very similar phones, and counting diacritics in relation to basic symbols.

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Feature economy in natural, random, and synthetic inventories

Cited by 10 publications

References 0 publications

Geometric Constraints on Human Speech Sound Inventories

Geometric Constraints on Human Speech Sound Inventories

Structure and Substance in Artificial‐Phonology Learning, Part II: Substance

Visualizing phonetic segment frequencies with density-equalizing maps

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