OCP Avoidance in Classical Chinese: Implications for Tonogenesis

Similarity Avoidance and the Ocp

It has long been known that verbal roots containing homorganic consonant pairs are rare in Arabic, motivating the existence of an OCP-Place constraint (Obligatory Contour Principle on place of articulation) in the phonological grammar. We explore this constraint using an on-line lexicon of Arabic roots. The strength of the constraint is quantified by the ratio of the observed number of examples...

Perception of Pitch and Tonal Timing: Implications for Mechanisms of Tonogenesis

This paper presents a discussion of tonal categories relating to pitch perception discrimination thresholds and the differences between pitch perception and the perception of tonal timing. Based on the results of a perception experiment using Swedish listeners and tonal timing results from the literature, this paper proposes perceptual mechanisms which may help explain the development of contou...

OCP Effects in Telugu

The antiantigemination phenomenon in Telugu is a case study of the relationship of the role of the OCP in lexical phonology, formal post-lexical phonology and phonetics. In this paper a number of different experimental findings relating to the OCP in various compartments of the grammar – the lexicon, the phonological component and the phonetic component – that seem like unrelated phenomena are ...

Aerodynamics of [ r ] in tonogenesis

The Ocp in Functional Phonology

Though seemingly a good candidate for a universal output-oriented constraint, the OCP does not occur as a constraint in the production grammar. Instead, it handles, in interaction with the NoCrossing Constraint, the correspondence between acoustic cues and perceptual feature values in the perception grammar. Because faithfulness constraints use the perception grammar to evaluate the similarity ...