This paper will outline some of the restrictions on what can and cannot appear at the end of a Burmese word. We will see that historical changes have resulted in a rather unusual phonotactic distribution. By looking at how Burmese speakers treat foreign loanwords in their language, it will be revealed what phonological principles the Burmese have generated in order to make sense of their phonot...

The study of phonotactics (e.g., the ability of English speakers to distinguish possible words like blick from impossible words like *bnick) is a central topic in phonology. We propose a theory of phonotactic grammars and a learning algorithm that constructs such grammars from positive evidence. Our grammars consist of constraints that are assigned numerical weights according to the principle o...

Developmental research indicates that infants use low-level statistical regularities, or phonotactics, to segment words from continuous speech. In this paper, we present a segmentation framework that enables the direct comparison of different phonotactic models for segmentation. We compare a model using phoneme transitional probabilities, which have been widely used in computational models, to ...

1.2 The Input 1.2.1 Surface forms • Consists of surface phonetic forms to which the children may or may not have attached a meaning (so we can’t assume any sort of semantic bootstrapping, morphemic knowledge, etc). • We can’t assume knowledge of relationships among forms, and therefore we can’t assume knowledge of underlying forms. • This means positive data only—what forms exist—whereas phonot...

A word-final consonant is standardly assumed to occupy a syllable coda. An alternative is to treat it as the onset of a syllable containing a phonetically unexpressed nucleus. The final-onset analysis is shown to out-perform the final-coda analysis on a range of phonological phenomena, including syllable typology, stress, vowel length, and consonant phonotactics. A constraint-based implementati...

Within the mainstream phonological framework of Optimality Theory (OT), grammars are parameterized by how they prioritize or rank a given set of constraints. OT online learning consists of slight re-rankings triggered by exposure to a single piece of data at the time. This paper presents a new online model for the acquisition of phonotactics in OT. Convergence and correctness are analytically i...

We report on experiments which demonstrate that by abductive inference it is possible to learn enough simple phonotactics to distinguish words from non-words for a simpliied set of Dutch, the monosyllables. The monosyllables are distinguished in input so that segmenta-tion is not problematic. Frequency information is withheld as is negative data. The methods are all tested using tenfold cross-v...

1 Introduction Linguistic theory presents a search space of possible grammars. Under that theory, learning a language requires navigating that search space in order to find the correct grammar (the most restrictive grammar consistent with the overt data provided to the learner). The computational difficulty of that task depends almost entirely on the formal structure of the search space. Any pl...

Previous research indicates that multiple levels of linguistic information play a role in the perception and discrimination of non-native phonemes. This study examines the interaction of phonetic, phonemic and phonological factors in the discrimination of non-native phonotactic contrasts. Listeners of Catalan, English, and Russian are presented with an initial #CC-#CəC contrast in a discriminat...