Phylogenetic methods have broad potential in linguistics beyond tree inference. Here, we show how a phylogenetic approach opens the possibility of gaining historical insights from entirely new kinds linguistic data--in this instance, statistical phonotactics. We extract phonotactic data 111 Pama-Nyungan vocabularies and apply tests for signal, quantifying degree to which reflect history. test t...

The eŒect of probabilistic phonotactics on lexical acquisition in typically developing children was examined to determine whether a lexical or sublexical level of language processing dominates lexical acquisition. Sixty-one normally achieving 7, 10, and 13 year-old children participated in a word learning task, involving non-words of varying probabilistic phonotactics. Non-words were presented ...

This research investigates children’s knowledge of how surface pronunciations of lexical items vary according to their phonological and morphological context. Dutch-learning children aged 2.5 and 3.5 years were tested on voicing neutralization and morphophonological alternations. For instance, voicing does not alternate between the pair [pɛt]∼[pɛtən] (cap∼caps) but does in [bɛt]∼[bɛdən] (bed∼be...

Gradual learning as gradual adjustment of constraint values (Rosenblatt 1962, Boersma 1998) automatically yields weighting values that can be used in an account of gradient phonotactics, if the grammar is formulated in terms of Harmonic Grammar (HG; Legendre, Smolensky and Miyata 1990). I propose a new metric for gradient acceptability in HG, and show how a complex case of gradient phonotactics...

Japanese speakers perceive an epenthetic vowel between consonants in words, reflecting an adaptation to Japanese phonotactics. However, there are some contexts in which CC (successive consonant) clusters are acceptable in Japanese speech. This study explored how Japanese speakers perceive phoneme sequences according to Japanese phonotactics. In Experiment 1, adults rated goodness of nonsense wo...

The problem of the acquisition of phonotactics in Optimality Theory is formulated as the problem of learning a ranking consistent with a finite set of data that furthermore corresponds to a smallest (w.r.t. set inclusion) language. The paper focuses on the universal formulation of the problem, whereby generating function and constraint set vary arbitrarily as inputs of the problem. It is shown ...

Building and developing linguistic resources for languages is of prime importance with many areas of application. This paper focusses on a fully automatic approach to the aquisition of a syllable phonotactics for a particular language. In this approach the phonotactic constraints for a language are encoded in a finite-state phonotactic automaton the structure of which can be automatically deriv...