Learning phonological categories
نویسندگان
چکیده
This paper describes in detail several explicit computational methods for approaching such questions in phonology as the vowel/consonant distinction, the nature of vowel harmony systems, and syllable structure, appealing solely to distributional information. Beginning with the vowel/consonant distinction, we consider a method for its discovery by the Russian linguist Sukhotin, and compare it to two newer methods of more general interest, both computational and theoretical, today. The rst is based on spectral decomposition of matrices, allowing for dimensionality reduction in a nely controlled way, and the second is based on nding parameters for maximum likelihood in a hidden Markov model. While all three methods work for discovering the fairly robust vowel/consonant distinction, we extend the newer ones to the discovery of vowel harmony, and in the case of the probabilistic model, to the discovery of some aspects of syllable structure, and o er an evaluation of the results.
منابع مشابه
Modelling phonological category learning
The term " phonological categories " refers to the discrete elements that make up a phonological representation, i.e. elements of its temporal organization (e.g. foot, syllable, mora, segment, or autosegment) and elements of its internal content (e.g. phonemes such as /p/ and /n/, or feature values such as [+nasal] and the high tone H). From the mere fact that the term " phonological category l...
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