Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-qsmjn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-25T05:18:08.881Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Incorporating tone in the modelling of wordlikeness judgements

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 March 2021

Youngah Do Open the ORCID record for Youngah Do [Opens in a new window]  and
Ryan Ka Yau Lai Open the ORCID record for Ryan Ka Yau Lai [Opens in a new window]
Youngah Do*
Affiliation:
University of Hong Kong
Ryan Ka Yau Lai*
Affiliation:
University of California, Santa Barbara
*
*E-mail: youngah@hku.hk, kayaulai@umail.ucsb.edu.
*E-mail: youngah@hku.hk, kayaulai@umail.ucsb.edu.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Various phonotactic models have been proposed for the prediction of wordlikeness judgements, most of which have focused primarily on segments. This article aims to model wordlikeness judgements when tone is incorporated. We first show how the two major determinants of wordlikeness judgements, i.e. phonotactic probability and neighbourhood density, can be measured when tone is involved. To test the role of the two determinants of wordlikeness judgements in a tone language, judgement data were obtained from speakers of Cantonese. Bayesian modelling was then used to model the judgement data, showing that phonotactic probability, but not neighbourhood density, influences wordlikeness judgements. We also show that phonotactic probability affects the tendency to judge items as absolutely perfect or more or less wordlike, while it does not affect judgements that an item is absolutely not wordlike. Implications of these results for phonotactic modelling and processes involved in wordlikeness judgements are discussed.

Type
Articles
Information
Phonology , Volume 37 , Issue 4 , November 2020 , pp. 577 - 615
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

The authors wish to thank Diana Archangeli, Adam Albright and the audience at Society for Computation in Linguistics (SciL) in 2019 for their valuable comments. Thanks are also due to the editors, associate editor and reviewers. The research for this paper builds on Do & Lai (forthcoming). We also wish to thank Andries Coetzee, Roger Levy and reviewers of that paper, whose feedback was important for the current work.

References

Albright, Adam (2007). Gradient phonological acceptability as a grammatical effect. Ms, MIT. Available (November 2020) at http://www.mit.edu/~albright/papers/Albright-GrammaticalGradience.pdf.Google Scholar
Albright, Adam (2009). Feature-based generalisation as a source of gradient acceptability. Phonology 26. 9–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Albright, Adam & Hayes, Bruce (2003). Rules vs. analogy in English past tenses: a computational/experimental study. Cognition 90. 119–161.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Alpatov, V. M. (1996). On the notion of submorph and its applicability to the languages of East and South-East Asia. In Pan-Asiatic Linguistics: Proceedings of the Fourth International Symposium on Languages and Linguistics, January 8–10, 1996. Salaya: Institute of Language and Culture for Rural Development, Mahidol University. 1799–1805Google Scholar
Bailey, Todd M. & Hahn, Ulrike (1998). Determinants of wordlikeness. In Gernsbacher, Morton Ann & Derry, Sharon J. (eds.) Proceedings of the 20th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Mahwah, N.J. & London: Erlbaum. 90–95.Google Scholar
Bailey, Todd M. & Hahn, Ulrike (2001). Determinants of wordlikeness: phonotactics or lexical neighborhoods? Journal of Memory and Language 44. 568–591.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bauer, Robert S. (1985). The expanding syllabary of Hong Kong Cantonese. Cahiers de Linguistique Asie Orientale 14. 99–111.Google Scholar
Bauer, Robert S. & Benedict, Paul K. (1997). Modern Cantonese phonology. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berent, Iris, Shimron, Joseph & Vaknin, Vered (2001). Phonological constraints on reading: evidence from the Obligatory Contour Principle. Journal of Memory and Language 44. 644–665.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berent, Iris, Steriade, Donca, Lennertz, Tracy & Vaknin, Vered (2007). What we know about what we have never heard: evidence from perceptual illusions. Cognition 104. 591–630.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bird, Steven & Ellison, T. Mark (1994). One-level phonology: autosegmental representations and rules as finite automata. Computational Linguistics 20. 55–90.Google Scholar
Boersma, Paul & Weenink, David (2019). Praat: doing phonetics by computer (version 6.0.49). http://www.praat.org.Google Scholar
Borowsky, Toni (1989). Structure preservation and the syllable coda in English. NLLT 7. 145–166.Google Scholar
Bürkner, Paul-Christian (2017a). brms: an R package for Bayesian multilevel models using Stan. Journal of Statistical Software 80:1. https://doi.org/10.18637/jss.v080.i01.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bürkner, Paul-Christian (2017b). Advanced Bayesian multilevel modeling with the R package brms. Available (November 2020) at http://arxiv.org/abs/1705.11123.Google Scholar
Cham, Hoi Yee Rebecca (2003). A cross-linguistic study of the development of the perception of lexical tones and phones. BSc thesis, University of Hong Kong. Available (December 2020) at https://core.ac.uk/reader/37886270.Google Scholar
Chan, Erica, Skehan, Peter & Gong, Gwendolyn (2011). Working memory, phonemic coding ability and foreign language aptitude: potential for construction of specific language aptitude tests – the case of Cantonese. Ilha Do Desterro: A Journal of English Language, Literatures in English and Cultural Studies 60. 45–73.Google Scholar
Chao, Yuen-Ren (1934). The non-uniqueness of phonemic solutions of phonetic systems. Bulletin of Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica 4. 363–397.Google Scholar
Cheung, Sik Lee (1991). The notion of ‘result’ in Cantonese children. Papers and Reports on Child Language Development 30. 17–24.Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam & Halle, Morris (1968). The sound pattern of English. New York: Harper & Row.Google Scholar
Clements, G. N. & Keyser, Samuel J. (1983). CV phonology: a generative theory of the syllable. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Coetzee, Andries W. (2009). Grammar is both categorical and gradient. In Parker, Steve (ed.) Phonological argumentation: essays on evidence and motivation. London & Oakville, Conn.: Equinox. 9–42.Google Scholar
Coleman, John (ed.) (1997). Proceedings of the 3rd Meeting of the ACL Special Interest Group in Computational Phonology. Somerset, N.J.: Association for Computational Linguistics.Google Scholar
Coleman, John & Pierrehumbert, Janet B. (1997). Stochastic phonological grammars and acceptability. In Coleman (1997). 49–56. Available (November 2020) at http://arxiv.org/abs/cmp-lg/9707017.Google Scholar
Cutler, Anne & Chen, Hsuan-Chih (1997). Lexical tone in Cantonese spoken-word processing. Perception and Psychophysics 59. 165–179.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Daland, Robert, Hayes, Bruce, White, James, Garellek, Marc, Davis, Andrea & Norrmann, Ingrid (2011). Explaining sonority projection effects. Phonology 28. 197–234.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dankovičová, Jana, West, Paula, Coleman, John & Slater, Andrew (1998). Phonotactic grammaticality is gradient. Poster presented at the 6th Conference on Laboratory Phonology, York. Available (November 2020) at http://www.phon.ox.ac.uk/jcoleman/LabPhon-poster-paper.pdf.Google Scholar
Dautriche, Isabelle, Mahowald, Kyle, Gibson, Edward, Christophe, Anne & Piantadosi, Steven T. (2017). Words cluster phonetically beyond phonotactic regularities. Cognition 163. 128–145.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Davidson, Lisa (2005). Addressing phonological questions with ultrasound. Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics 19. 619–633.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Davidson, Lisa (2006a). Phonotactics and articulatory coordination interact in phonology: evidence from nonnative production. Cognitive Science 30. 837–862.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davidson, Lisa (2006b). Phonology, phonetics, or frequency: influences on the production of non-native sequences. JPh 34. 104–137.Google Scholar
Denby, Thomas, Schecter, Jeffrey, Arn, Sean, Dimov, Svetlin & Goldrick, Matthew (2018). Contextual variability and exemplar strength in phonotactic learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 44. 280–294.Google ScholarPubMed
Do, Youngah & Yau Lai, Ryan Ka (forthcoming). Accounting for lexical tones when modeling phonological distance. Lg 97.Google Scholar
Dupoux, Emmanuel, Kakehi, Kazuhiko, Hirose, Yuki, Pallier, Christophe & Mehler, Jacques (1999). Epenthetic vowels in Japanese: a perceptual illusion? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 25. 1568–1578.Google Scholar
Estes, Katharine Graf, Evans, Julia L. & Else-Quest, Nicole M. (2007). Differences in the nonword repetition performance of children with and without specific language impairment: a meta-analysis. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 50. 177–195.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frisch, Stefan A., Broe, Michael B. & Pierrehumbert, Janet B. (1997). Similarity and phonotactics in Arabic. Available as ROA-223 from the Rutgers Optimality Archive.Google Scholar
Frisch, Stefan A., Large, Nathan R. & Pisoni, David B. (2000). Perception of wordlikeness: effects of segment probability and length on the processing of nonwords. Journal of Memory and Language 42. 481–496.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Frisch, Stefan A. & Zawaydeh, Bushra (2001). The psychological reality of OCP-place in Arabic. Lg 77. 91–106.Google Scholar
Futrell, Richard, Albright, Adam, Graff, Peter & O'Donnell, Timothy J. (2017). A generative model of phonotactics. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics 5. 73–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gandour, Jack (1981). Perceptual dimensions of tone: evidence from Cantonese. Journal of Chinese Linguistics 9. 20–36.Google Scholar
Gathercole, Susan E. & Martin, Amanda J. (1996). Interactive processes in phonological memory. In Gathercole, Susan E. (ed.) Models of short-term memory. Hove: Psychology Press. 73–100.Google Scholar
Gong, Shuxiao (2017). Grammaticality and lexical statistics in Chinese unnatural phonotactics. UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 29. 1–23.Google Scholar
Gong, Shuxiao & Zhang, Jie (2020). Gradient acceptability in Mandarin nonword judgment. In Hyunah Baek, Chikako Takahashi & Alex Hong-Lun Yeung (eds.) Proceedings of the 2019 Annual Meeting on Phonology. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/amp.v8i0.4660.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gorman, Kyle (2013). Generative phonotactics. PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.Google Scholar
Greenberg, Joseph H. & Jenkins, James J. (1964). Studies in the psychological correlates of the sound system of American English. Word 20. 157–177.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hay, Jennifer, Pierrehumbert, Janet B. & Beckman, Mary E. (2003). Speech perception, well-formedness and the statistics of the lexicon. In Local, John, Ogden, Richard & Temple, Rosalind (eds.) Phonetic interpretation: papers in laboratory phonology VI. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 58–74.Google Scholar
Hayes, Bruce (2000). Gradient well-formedness in Optimality Theory. In Dekkers, Joost, van der Leeuw, Frank & van de Weijer, Jeroen (eds.) Optimality Theory: phonology, syntax, and acquisition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 88–120.Google Scholar
Hayes, Bruce & Wilson, Colin (2008). A maximum entropy model of phonotactics and phonotactic learning. LI 39. 379–440.Google Scholar
Hockett, C. F. (1966). The quantification of functional load: a linguistic problem. Report RM-5168-PR. Santa Monica: Rand.Google Scholar
Jurafsky, Daniel & Martin, James H. (2019). Speech and language processing. 3rd edn. Draft available (November 2020) at https://web.stanford.edu/~jurafsky/slp3/.Google Scholar
Jusczyk, Peter W., Luce, Paul A. & Charles-Luce, Jan (1994). Infants’ sensitivity to phonotactic patterns in the native language. Journal of Memory and Language 33. 630–645.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kabak, Barış & Idsardi, William J. (2007). Perceptual distortions in the adaptation of English consonant clusters: syllable structure or consonantal contact constraints? Language and Speech 50. 23–52.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kessler, Brett (2005). Phonetic comparison algorithms. Transactions of the Philological Society 103. 243–260.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Keung, Tsang & Hoosain, Rumjahn (1979). Segmental phonemes and tonal phonemes in comprehension of Cantonese. Psychologia: An International Journal of Psychology in the Orient 22. 222–224.Google Scholar
Khouw, Edward & Ciocca, Valter (2007). Perceptual correlates of Cantonese tones. JPh 35. 104–117.Google Scholar
Kirby, James P. & Yu, Alan C. L. (2007). Lexical and phonotactic effects on wordlikeness judgements in Cantonese. In Trouvain, Jürgen & Barry, William J. (eds.) Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. Saarbrücken: Saarland University. 1389–1392.Google Scholar
Ladefoged, Peter (1975). A course in phonetics. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.Google Scholar
Lai, Regine & Winterstein, Grégoire (2020). Cifu: a frequency lexicon of Hong Kong Cantonese. In Calzolari, Nicoletta et al. (eds.) Proceedings of the 12th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference. Marseille: European Language Resources Association. 3069–3077. http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2020/editors.html.Google Scholar
Light, Timothy (1977). The Cantonese final: an exercise in indigenous analysis. Journal of Chinese Linguistics 5. 75–102.Google Scholar
Lin, Yu-Leng (2016). Sonority effects and learning bias in nasal harmony. PhD dissertation, University of Toronto.Google Scholar
Luke, Kang Kwong & Wong, May L. Y. (2015). The Hong Kong Cantonese corpus: design and uses. In Tsou, Benjamin K. & Kwong, Oi Yee (eds.) Linguistic corpus and corpus linguistics in the Chinese context. (Journal of Chinese Linguistics Monograph Series.) 312–333.Google Scholar
Maddieson, Ian & Precoda, Kristin (1989). Updating UPSID. JASA 86. S19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Matthews, Stephen & Yip, Virginia (2011). Cantonese: a comprehensive grammar. 2nd edn. London & New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Mok, Peggy P. K., Zuo, Donghui & Wong, Peggy W. Y. (2013). Production and perception of a sound change in progress: tone merging in Hong Kong Cantonese. Language Variation and Change 25. 341–370.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Myers, James (2015). Markedness and lexical typicality in Mandarin acceptability judgments. Language and Linguistics 16. 791–818.Google Scholar
Myers, James (2016). Meta-megastudies. The Mental Lexicon 11. 329–349.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Myers, James & Tsay, Jane (2005). The processing of phonological acceptability judgments. Proceedings of Symposium on 90–92 NSC Projects. 26–45. Available (November 2020) at http://www.ccunix.ccu.edu.tw/~lnglab/paper/MyersTsay-procjudge-nochin.pdf.Google Scholar
Myers, Scott (1987). Vowel shortening in English. NLLT 5. 485–518.Google Scholar
Nerbonne, John & Heeringa, Wilbert (1997). Measuring dialect distance phonetically. In Coleman (1997). 11–18. Available (November 2020) at https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W97-1102.Google Scholar
Nosofsky, Robert M. (1986). Attention, similarity, and the identification–categorization relationship. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 115. 39–57.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ohala, John J. & Ohala, Manjari (1986). Testing hypotheses regarding the psychological manifestation of morpheme structure constraints. In Ohala, John J. & Jaeger, Jeri (eds.) Experimental phonology. Orlando: Academic Press. 239–252.Google Scholar
Olejarczuk, Paul & Kapatsinski, Vsevolod (2018). The metrical parse is guided by gradient phonotactics. Phonology 35. 367–405.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
O'Seaghdha, Padraig G., Chen, Jenn-Yeu & Chen, Train-Min (2010). Proximate units in word production: phonological encoding begins with syllables in Mandarin Chinese but with segments in English. Cognition 115. 282–302.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ospina, Raydonal & Ferrari, Silvia L. P. (2012). A general class of zero-or-one inflated beta regression models. Computational Statistics and Data Analysis 56. 1609–1623.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
R Core Team (2020). R: a language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. http://www.R-project.org/.Google Scholar
Richtsmeier, Peter T. (2011). Word-types, not word-tokens, facilitate extraction of phonotactic sequences by adults. Laboratory Phonology 2. 157–183.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ripley, Brian (2016). nnet. R package (version 7.3-12). https://www.rdocumentation.org/packages/nnet.Google Scholar
Roettger, Timo B. (2019). Researcher degrees of freedom in phonetic research. Laboratory Phonology 10. https://doi.org/10.5334/labphon.147.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rose, Sharon & King, Lisa (2007). Speech error elicitation and co-occurrence restrictions in two Ethiopian Semitic languages. Language and Speech 50. 451–504.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Schütze, Carlson T. (1996). The empirical base of linguistics: grammaticality judgments and linguistic methodology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Shademan, Shabnam (2006). Is phonotactic knowledge grammatical knowledge? WCCFL 25. 371–379.Google Scholar
Shoemark, Philippa (2013). Cross-linguistic network structure effects on non-word acceptability judgements. MA dissertation, University of Edinburgh.Google Scholar
Simmons, Joseph P., Nelson, Leif D. & Simonsohn, Uri (2011). False-positive psychology: undisclosed flexibility in data collection and analysis allows presenting anything as significant. Psychological Science 22. 1359–1366.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Steegen, Sara, Tuerlinckx, Francis, Gelman, Andrew & Vanpaemel, Wolf (2016). Increasing transparency through a multiverse analysis. Perspectives on Psychological Science 11. 702–712.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Stokes, Stephanie F., Wong, Anita M. Y., Fletcher, Paul & Leonard, Laurence B. (2006). Nonword repetition and sentence repetition as clinical markers of specific language impairment: the case of Cantonese. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 49. 219–236.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Taft, Marcus & Chen, Hsuan-Chih (1992). Judging homophony in Chinese: the influence of tones. In Chen, Hsuan-Chih & Tzeng, Ovid J. L. (eds.) Language processing in Chinese. Amsterdam: North-Holland. 151–172.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vehtari, Aki, Gelman, Andrew & Gabry, Jonah (2017). Practical Bayesian model evaluation using leave-one-out cross-validation and WAIC. Statistics and Computing 27. 1413–1432.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vitevitch, Michael S. & Luce, Paul A. (1998). When words compete: levels of processing in perception of spoken words. Psychological Science 9. 325–329.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vitevitch, Michael S. & Luce, Paul A. (1999). Probabilistic phonotactics and neighborhood activation in spoken word recognition. Journal of Memory and Language 40. 374–408.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vitevitch, Michael S. & Luce, Paul A. (2004). A web-based interface to calculate phonotactic probability for words and nonwords in English. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, and Computers 36. 481–487.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Vitevitch, Michael S. & Luce, Paul A. (2005). Increases in phonotactic probability facilitate spoken nonword repetition. Journal of Memory and Language 52. 193–204.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vitevitch, Michael S., Luce, Paul A., Charles-Luce, Jan & Kemmerer, David (1997). Phonotactics and syllable stress: implications for the processing of spoken nonsense words. Language and Speech 40. 47–62.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wiener, Seth & Turnbull, Rory (2016). Constraints of tones, vowels and consonants on lexical selection in Mandarin Chinese. Language and Speech 59. 59–82.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Xu, Yisheng, Gandour, Jackson T. & Francis, Alexander L. (2006). Effects of language experience and stimulus complexity on the categorical perception of pitch direction. JASA 120. 1063–1074CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Yang, Cathryn & Castro, Andy (2008). Representing tone in Levenshtein distance. International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing 2. 205–219.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Yip, Moira (1989). Cantonese morpheme structure and linear ordering. WCCFL 8. 445–456.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: PDF

Do and Lai supplementary material

Do and Lai supplementary material 1

Download Do and Lai supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 1.6 MB
Supplementary material: File

Do and Lai supplementary material

Do and Lai supplementary material 2

Download Do and Lai supplementary material(File)
File 343.6 KB