A Cross-Linguistic Study of Phonological Units: Syllables Emerge from the Statistics of Mandarin Chinese, but not from the Statistics of English

Abstract

This study explored the statistical patterns of English and Mandarin Chinese sound sequences, by comparing their learning in a simple recurrent network. Experiment 1 showed that vivid syllable structure emerged from the sound sequence of Mandarin Chinese. Experiment 2 further demonstrated that the emerged syllable structure of Mandarin Chinese is considerably more salient than that of English. We claim that the more salient syllable structure in Mandarin Chinese inputs is one reason why syllable units are particularly emphasized in its processing in comparison to English.