In this study EMA has been used to observe speech articulator movements during successive productions of a variety of novel polysyllabic nonsense words conforming to English phonotactics. Analysis of sensor trajectories comparing initial and final repetitions shows in general reduction of overall duration and distance travelled, lower variability, and fewer acceleration peaks. Comparison of con...

Each language has a unique set of phonemic categories and phonotactic rules which determine permissible sound sequences in that language. Behavioral research demonstrates that one's native language shapes the perception of both sound categories and sound sequences in adults, and neuroimaging results further indicate that the processing of native phonemes and phonotactics involves a left-dominan...

This paper presents ongoing collaborative research which focuses on the application of computational linguistic techniques to the analysis of a corpus of native and non-native speech. The aim of this research is to use computational tools for phonological acquisition and representation to identify regularities and sub-regularities between different speaker groups. The corpus is being collected ...

An interesting puzzle of Hungarian phonology is gemination in recent loanwords borrowed from English, German (and occasionally, from French). A consonant following a short stressed vowel is often geminated in the loanword, even if the consonant doubling does not have an orthographic reflex in the source word, i.e. the consonant in question is not spelt as a double letter in the source word. Unl...

During early language development native phonotactics are acquired in a 'bottom-up' fashion, relying on exquisite auditory differentiation skills operational from birth. Since basic lexico-semantic abilities have been demonstrated from 6 months onwards, 'top-down' influences on phonotactic learning may complement the extraction of transitional probabilities in phonotactic learning. Such a bidir...

Research on English and other languages has shown that syllables and words that contain more information tend to be produced with longer duration. This research is evolving into a general thesis that speakers articulate linguistic units with more information more robustly. While this hypothesis seems plausible from the perspective of communicative efficiency, previous support for it has come ma...

This paper reports on a limited model of language evolution that incorporates transmission noise and errorful learning as sources of variation. The model illustrates how the adaptation of language to the statistical learning mechanisms of infants may be a factor in the apparent ceiling on adult second language achievement. The model is limited in its focus to only phonotactics because the proba...

This article gives a detailed quantitative account of Samoan root phonotactics. In particular, count data is given in eleven tables of segment frequencies (i.e., consonants, short and long vowels, diphthongs) and frequencies of combinations of segments (i.e., syllable types, consonant-vowel combinations, V-V and C-C combinations across syllables). Systematic patterns of overand under-representa...