Neutralization and homophony avoidance in phonological learning

A counterexample to homophony avoidance*

Word learning: Homophony and the distribution of learning exemplars

How do children infer the meaning of a word? Current accounts of word learning assume that children expect a word to map onto exactly one concept whose members form a coherent category. If this assumption was strictly true, children should infer that a homophone, such as ”bat”, refers to a single superordinate category that encompasses both animal-bats and baseball-bats. The current study explo...

Root-Controlled Fusion in Zoque: Root-Faith and Neutralization Avoidance

A growing body of work in Optimality Theory reveals the privileged status of roots compared to affixes in natural languages. This has lead to the postulation of distinct faithfulness constraints for roots and affixes, and most researchers agree that the ranking FAITHROOT >> FAITHAFFIX universally holds. In this paper, I argue that this approach is further supported by the behavior of fusion fou...

A statistical argument for the homophony avoidance approach to the disyllabification of Chinese

Under the homophone avoidance (HA) theory (Guo 1928, Wang 1944, Karlgren 1949, Lü 1963, Li and Thompson 1981), monosyllabic words are disyllabified to avoid homophonous ambiguities. Lü 1963 predicts that the more monosyllabic homophones there are in a language, the more likely disyllabic words would be created. Duanmu 1999 argues against the HA approach and claims that no supporting evidence ha...

Contrast Analysis in Phonological Learning