Incorporating tone in the calculation of phonotactic probability

Abstract

This paper investigates how the ordering of tone relative to the segmental string influences the calculation of phonotactic probability. Trigram and recurrent neural network models were trained on syllable lexicons of four Asian syllable-tone languages (Mandarin, Thai, Vietnamese, and Cantonese) in which tone was treated as a segment occurring in different positions in the string. For trigram models, the optimal permutation interacted with language, while neural network models were relatively unaffected by tone position in all languages. In addition to providing a baseline for future evaluation, these results suggest that phonotactic probability is robust to choices of how tone is ordered with respect to other elements in the syllable.