This paper presents two cases of lexically gradient phonotactic restrictions that operate against what would be phonetically natural: Tarma Quechua and Berawan. The paper shows that the unnatural trends in the lexicon are statistically significant, phonetically real, and show clear signs of productivity, with evidence from loanword phonology and from morphophonological alternations. Based on th...

We present a probabilistic model of phonotactics, the set of well-formed phoneme sequences in a language. Unlike most computational models of phonotactics (Hayes and Wilson, 2008; Goldsmith and Riggle, 2012), we take a fully generative approach, modeling a process where forms are built up out of subparts by phonologically-informed structure building operations. We learn an inventory of subparts...

The present study explored the influence of a new metrics of phonotactics on adults' use of transitional probabilities to segment artificial languages. We exposed French native adults to continuous streams of trisyllabic nonsense words. High-frequency words had either high or low congruence with French phonotactics, in the sense that their syllables had either high or low positional frequency i...

Previous experimental research has found that adults and infants are sensitive to the likelihood of occurrence of sequences of segments, or probabilistic phonotactics, in the ambient language. One hypothesis that emerges from this finding is that probabilistic phonotactics, a sublexical factor, may influence rate of lexical acquisition. Preliminary results are reported from a study involving 21...

All human languages have restrictions on sound sequences, called phonotactic constraints. Knowledge of phonotactic constraints is typically tested using pseudoword rating tasks, e.g., an English speaker might be asked to rate acceptability or wordlikeness of the phonotactically illegal /bnɪk/ and the phonotactically legal /blɪk/. We introduce a new method of testing knowledge of phonotactic con...

This paper shows how a society of agents can self-organise a shared vocalisation system which is discrete, combinatorial, and has a form of primitive phonotactics, starting from holistic inarticulate vocalisations. The originality of the system is that: 1) it does not include any explicit pressure for communication; 2) agents do not possess capabilities of coordinated interactions, in particula...

It has been well documented that language specific cues—such as transitional probability (TP), stress and phonotactics—can be used for word segmentation. In our current work, we investigate what role a phonological universal, the sonority sequencing principle (SSP), may also play. Participants were presented with an unsegmented stream of speech from an artificial language with non-English onset...