Accidental Gaps Research Articles

Identifying generalizable knowledge from the distribution of tonotactic accidental gaps in Mandarin

This study investigates tonotactic accidental gaps (unattested syllable-tone combinations) in Mandarin Chinese. In a corpus study, we found that, independent of syllable type, T2 (rising) and T3 (falling-rising) gaps were over-represented, whereas T1 (high level) and T4 (falling) gaps were under-represented. We also observed fewer T1 gaps with voiceless onsets and more T2 and T3 gaps with voiceless onsets, a pattern that is consistent with cross-linguistic observations. While these trends were generally reflected in a wordlikeness rating experiment by Mandarin listeners, their judgements of these gaps, similar to those of real words, were also guided by neighborhood density. Furthermore, T2 gaps with real-word T3 counterparts were rated as more wordlike, a result attributed to the T3 sandhi in Mandarin Chinese. Finally, we used harmonic scores generated from the UCLA Phonotactic Learner to explicitly test the role of lexical knowledge and markedness constraints in modeling speakers’ tonotactic knowledge reflected in the wordlikeness ratings. We found that grammars induced from lexical data were the most successful at predicting wordlikeness ratings of gaps and lexical syllables combined. However, when focused on the ratings of tonotactic gaps, grammars with markedness constraints informed by cross-linguistic observations were more successful even without the constraints being weighted on lexical data. The results show how lexical knowledge and universal markedness, which is not entirely learnable from the lexicon, may account for some tonotactic generalizations.

Phonological Well-Formedness Constraints in Mandarin Phonotactics: Evidence From Lexical Decision.

This article investigates the role of phonological well-formedness constraints in Mandarin speakers' phonotactic grammar and how they affect online speech processing. Mandarin non-words can be categorized into systematic gaps and accidental gaps, depending on whether they violate principled phonotactic constraints based on the Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP). Non-word acceptability judgment experiments have shown that systematic gaps received lower wordlikeness ratings than accidental gaps. Using a lexical decision task, this study found that systematic gaps were rejected significantly faster than accidental gaps, even after lexical statistics were taken into account. These findings thus provide converging evidence for the essential status of the OCP-based phonotactic constraints in Mandarin speakers' phonological knowledge.

Children’s speech innovations

The difference between children’s and adults’ speech consists in unusual lexemes or forms of familiar words as well as non-standard meanings of common words occurring in the former. The term error is not appropriate for such cases since these are legitimate elements of the child’s emerging language system. Despite their uniqueness, they do not hinder children’s communication with grown-ups. These units violating the linguistic norm are called innovations. The analysis of children’s innovations enables linguists to explore the nature of language rules and their hierarchical structure as well as to identify accidental gaps (or lacunae) in the language. The article presents a typology of children’s speech innovations from the standpoint of the language norm.

Accidental Gaps and Surface-Based Phonotactic Learning: A Case Study of South Bolivian Quechua

The lexicon of a natural language does not contain all of the phonological structures that are grammatical. This presents a fundamental challenge to the learner, who must distinguish linguistically significant restrictions from accidental gaps ( Fischer-Jørgensen 1952 , Halle 1962 , Chomsky and Halle 1965 , Pierrehumbert 1994 , Frisch and Zawaydeh 2001 , Iverson and Salmons 2005 , Gorman 2013 , Hayes and White 2013 ). The severity of the challenge depends on the size of the lexicon ( Pierrehumbert 2001 ), the number of sounds and their frequency distribution ( Sigurd 1968 , Tambovtsev and Martindale 2007 ), and the complexity of the generalizations that learners must entertain ( Pierrehumbert 1994 , Hayes and Wilson 2008 , Kager and Pater 2012 , Jardine and Heinz 2016 ). In this squib, we consider the problem that accidental gaps pose for learning phonotactic grammars stated on a single, surface level of representation. While the monostratal approach to phonology has considerable theoretical and computational appeal ( Ellison 1993 , Bird and Ellison 1994 , Scobbie, Coleman, and Bird 1996 , Burzio 2002 ), little previous research has investigated how purely surface-based phonotactic grammars can be learned from natural lexicons (but cf. Hayes and Wilson 2008 , Hayes and White 2013 ). The empirical basis of our study is the sound pattern of South Bolivian Quechua, with particular focus on the allophonic distribution of high and mid vowels. We show that, in characterizing the vowel distribution, a surface-based analysis must resort to generalizations of greater complexity than are needed in traditional accounts that derive outputs from underlying forms. This exacerbates the learning problem, because complex constraints are more likely to be surface-true by chance (i.e., the structures they prohibit are more likely to be accidentally absent from the lexicon). A comprehensive quantitative analysis of the Quechua lexicon and phonotactic system establishes that many accidental gaps of the relevant complexity level do indeed exist. We propose that, to overcome this problem, surface-based phonotactic models should have two related properties: they should use distinctive features to state constraints at multiple levels of granularity, and they should select constraints of appropriate granularity by statistical comparison of observed and expected frequency distributions. The central idea is that actual gaps typically belong to statistically robust feature-based classes, whereas accidental gaps are more likely to be featurally isolated and to contain independently rare sounds. A maximum-entropy learning model that incorporates these two properties is shown to be effective at distinguishing systematic and accidental gaps in a whole-language phonotactic analysis of Quechua, outperforming minimally different models that lack features or perform nonstatistical induction.

Un supplementum al supplementum: Iscrizioni imperiali di Roma dagli anni ’90 a oggi

In this survey article are collected and discussed most of the imperial inscriptions found in Rome after the pubblication of the last Supplement to CIL, VI by Géza Alföldy in 1996, together with a large number of possible corrections of the already published texts. The contributions are organized according the following schema: Addenda et corrigenda: small corrections, accidental gaps, methodological in­consistencies, texts to be removed. New texts and new studies: new discoveries (including new fragments of old inscriptions), both in archaeological excavations and in archives and repositories, just published (as imperial inscriptions or not) or still unpublished.

Pitch Perception in Tone Language-Speaking Adults With and Without Autism Spectrum Disorders.

Enhanced low-level pitch perception has been universally reported in autism spectrum disorders (ASD). This study examined whether tone language speakers with ASD exhibit this advantage. The pitch perception skill of 20 Cantonese-speaking adults with ASD was compared with that of 20 neurotypical individuals. Participants discriminated pairs of real syllable, pseudo-syllable (syllables that do not conform the phonotactic rules or are accidental gaps), and non-speech (syllables with attenuated high-frequency segmental content) stimuli contrasting pitch levels. The results revealed significantly higher discrimination ability in both groups for the non-speech stimuli than for the pseudo-syllables with one semitone difference. No significant group differences were noted. Different from previous findings, post hoc analysis found that enhanced pitch perception was observed in a subgroup of participants with ASD showing no history of delayed speech onset. The tone language experience may have modulated the pitch processing mechanism in the speakers in both ASD and non-ASD groups.

How far can diachronic change be predicted

This paper attempts to predict diachronic change in the restricted domain of Italo-Romance first person plural present indicative allomorphs, starting from the reconstructed Proto-Italo-Romance forms -amo, -emo, -imo, preserved in several dialects to this day (with corresponding subjunctives -emo, -iamo, -iamo). The predictions, or rather retrodictions (to be differentiated below) are based on the theory of Natural Morphology (NM). Morphology-initiated changes lead to 64 logically conceivable distributions in the earlier and present Italo-Romance dialects. The retrodictions are meant to account for the identity of attested distributions with possible (‘legal’) distributions, for unattested impossible (‘illegal’) distributions and for two accidental gaps in distributions. Moreover, we try to predict why certain attested distributions are more probable and therefore more frequent than others and introduce a new method of empirically testing such probability retrodictions.

Typology in Optimality Theory

AbstractThe mechanism of constraint re‐ranking basis makes Optimality Theory (OT) a typologically oriented theory of phonology. Permuting the prioritization of constraints on a language‐specific basis generates a factorial typology of phonological patterns. Patterns generated by an optimality‐theoretic account can be compared with the set of attested patterns found in languages of the world to determine how well the analysis fits the observed typology. The typological predictions of OT are constrained to a large extent by the grounding of markedness constraints in independent facts about speech articulation, perception, and processing. Nevertheless, comprehensive typological analyses within OT commonly overpredict the existence of apparently unattested patterns. These cases of overgeneration may stem from several sources: they may be pathologic, may reflect accidental gaps due to the paucity of a given phenomenon, or may be grounded in diachronic biases in speech perception or production. The phonetic underpinnings and factorial typology of three phenomena are discussed in this article: syllable structure, the distribution of contour tones, and the loci of laryngeal neutralization.

The Psychological Reality of OCP-Place in Arabic

The psychological reality of an abstract consonant dissimilation constraint is demonstrated in an experiment with native speakers of Jordanian Arabic. In this experiment, novel verbs containing constraint violations and those without violations were presented orthographically for judgments of well-formedness. Native speaker well-formedness judgments reflected knowledge of the phonotactic constraint. Systematic gaps were rated much less wordlike than accidental gaps that were equivalent in their lexical characteristics. Judgments for novel verbs containing constraint violations were also gradiently influenced by consonant pair similarity. The experimental study supports previous dictionary-based phonotactic analyses that propose that the native speaker's knowledge of consonant cooccurrence constraints in Arabic is based on emergent generalizations over the lexical items in an abstract root lexicon.

Spooning and basketing: children's dealing with accidental gaps in the lexicon.

The abilities of 2-, 5-, and 7-year-old children to interpret, judge the acceptability of, and produce class extensions were assessed. Class extensions are linguistic constructions in which a word that normally functions as a member of one syntactic category is used as a member of another, as in the sentence He is pianoing Christmas songs. Subjects in each age group understood sentences containing class extensions to some extent. However, the 2-year-olds' performance was depressed relative to the near-maximal performance of the older subjects, because they were generally insensitive to word-order cues in the stimulus sentences. Only the 7-year-olds consistently judged sentences containing class extensions to be deviant; the 5-year-olds confused syntax and semantics in making their judgments. The 7-year-olds were also able to produce class-extension phrases "on demand" more frequently than the 5-year-olds. It is concluded that the increasing ability with age to deal appropriately with class extensions is primarily due to general advances in language acquisition rather than to any development unique to the class-extension word-formation process. It is noted that the pattern of results reported, as well as observations that children's use of class extensions in spontaneous speech declines with age, may both be accounted for if word-formation rules are assumed to be "nonproductive, general rules," with a generative component and a later-acquired inhibitory component.

"Spooning" and "Basketing": Children's Dealing with Accidental Gaps in the Lexicon

"Spooning" and "Basketing": Children's Dealing with Accidental Gaps in the Lexicon

Impersonal Verbs and Their Lexical Specification

These so-called impersonal verbs share a number of syntactic and semantic properties. In this paper we will concentrate on the following interesting fact about these verbs (which to the best of my knowledge has been not previously noticed): IMPERSONAL VERBS IN RUSSIAN DO NOT FORM ACTIVE PARTICIPLES OR GERUNDS. Thus the paradigm of an impersonal verb like tosnit' does not include forms like *tonjalfiij, *tognivgij, *toinja, or *togniv. The discussion will center on the most appropriate way to incorporate facts like this into the grammar of Russian. One possible way is to treat the nonoccurrence of these forms as accidental gaps in the paradigm of these verbs and simply to enter this information in some convenient way in the lexical entry for the verb (e.g., as a feature). In other words we can treat the nonoccurrence of forms like *tonja.Sij etc. the same way that we must treat the nonoccurrence of forms like *pobeZu/*pobeidu (1sg. pres. of pobedit'), as phonologically, morphologically, syntactically, and semantically unmotivated gaps that must be listed in the lexicon.2 But by separately marking each impersonal verb as not having a gerund or active participle we miss a generalization: this fact seems to be a class property and should not have to be repeated for each member of the class. We can get around this problem by incorporating this fact into the grammar of Russian by means of a lexical redundancy rule which states that verbs that cannot occur with a subject lack gerund and active participle forms.3 But even this proposal seems to be based on the assumption that the two facts are unrelated and that there is no causal relationship between the absence of a subject NP and the lack of gerund and active participle forms. There is a large class of verbs in Russian which provides evidence that these defects in the paradigm of impersonal verbs are not accidental gaps