The metrical parse is guided by gradient phonotactics

Abstract

Phonotactic generalisations can be computed at different levels of granularity, from a coarse-grained legal/illegal dichotomy (blick, dwick ≻ *bnick, *lbick) to a fine-grained gradient of acceptability (blick ≻ dwick ≻ bnick ≻ lbick). This article investigates the sensitivity of the English metrical parse to the granularity of medial onset phonotactics. We present two experiments that feature pseudo-words with medial consonants and CC clusters varying in word-edge frequency and sonority (e.g. vatablick, vatadwick, vatabnick, vatalbick). The metrical parse is inferred from a hyphenation experiment and an online stress-assignment experiment. The results of both studies indicate that the parse is stochastic, and guided by relatively fine-grained phonotactic dependencies. Vocabulary simulations suggest that this level of granularity may arise because the gradient parser consistently outperforms the coarse-grained alternative across the developing lexicon.

Weight and final vowels in the English stress system

“…Experiment 2 tests participants’ knowledge of the Latin Stress Rule, and its interaction with the final-[i] generalisation. This experiment confirms that English speakers do have productive knowledge of the Latin Stress Rule (as previously demonstrated by Domahs et al 2014 and Olejarczuk & Kapatsinski 2018), and reveals how the Latin Stress Rule and the final-[i] generalisation interact in speakers’ grammars. The results of Experiment 2 are consistent with the use of the parochial constraint, but not with the cloned N on-fin constraint.…”

“…The remainder of this section will focus on describing the factors that condition the choice between penultimate and antepenultimate main stress. Unless otherwise noted, morphologically complex and morphologically simple words are both included in the counts – it will turn out that, for the trends described here, morphological complexity does not matter as much as might be imagined (see Olejarczuk & Kapatsinski 2018 for a similar result. )…”

“…In the search of Weide (1994) presented below, the monophthongs [ɑ æ ʌ ə ɔ ɛ ɨ ɪ ʊ i u], as well as the syllabic consonants [l̩ ɹ̩ m̩ n̩ ŋ̩], are categorised as short vowels, and the diphthongs [eɪ aɪ oʊ aʊ oɪ] as long. Note that the classification of [i] and [u] as short differs from other researchers, in particular Olejarczuk & Kapatsinski (2018), who treat syllables containing [i] and [u] as heavy. I categorise such syllables as light here, both because in the dictionary search words with [i] and [u] in penultimate position patterned with light-penult words rather than with heavy-penult words, and because Carpenter (2010, 2016) finds experimentally that [i] and [u] do not attract stress for English speakers.…”

“…The weight of the penultimate syllable overwhelmingly affects stress placement in English. Heavy penults, and penults that can be heavy if they are stressed, strongly prefer to host the word's main stress, a tendency which has previously been shown to be productive by Domahs et al (2014) and Olejarczuk & Kapatsinski (2018). The influence of the word's final vowel is a novel finding, however 5 .…”

Incorporating tone in the modelling of wordlikeness judgements

“…Previous work has examined how prosodic features related to stress should be incorporated into phonotactic models (Bird & Ellison 1994, Coleman & Pierrehumbert 1997, Hayes & Wilson 2008, Olejarczuk & Kapatsinski 2018). There is previous work on wordlikeness judgements of tone languages which considers only segmental phonotactics, but omits tone.…”