Explanation for Language Universals

1. Explanation for Language Universals Marta i Aleksandra

2. The Origin of Features and Segments • Mentalistic approach: involvement of the elements of conscious intent on the part of the originators of the phonemic principle • Mechanistic approach: segmental and featural structure of speech is much more likely to arise accidentally [argument: a stage during children...]

3. Holistic vs. Phonemic Coding • Holistic coding: every derived syllable remains a gestalt pattern that cannot be fractioned into smaller parts occuring also in other syllables • Phonemic coding: every selected signal can be reduced to subparts shared with other syllables of the subset

4. Simulations of emerging phonetic structure Results • in the presence of certain constraints a continuous space can become quantally structured • minimal pairs - argument for existence of phonemes • complementary distribution of /g/ phoneme - argument for allophones

5. Points of articulation in the CV space

6. Phonetic Constraints • Talker-based conditions 1. Sensory discriminability 2. Preference for “less extreme” articulation • Listener-based condition 3. Perceptual distance 4. Perceptual salience

7. Conclusion • Transitions are generally more articulatorily “expensive” than they are perceptually “valuable”. Thus there is a built in bias toward selecting and [gu] rather than and [gi] i [ f ] u [ f ]

8. How the phonemic structuring of lexical items differs from holistic coding? • Consider a minilexicon containing 12 words, all in the form of CV syllables. The total number of possible CV trajectories is very large. Suppose we systematically search for sets of 12 CV sequences ; we can envision 2 extreme outcomes of such a hypothetical search:

9. All words phonetically different

10. All possible combinations of points are used END POINTS 1 2 3 4 1 * * * * 2 * * * * 3 * * * * STARTING POINTS

11. Occurence of derived CV combinations • Observation: Although the phonetic diversity of the world’s languages is impressive, it is nevertheless true that they fastidiously underexploit the full range of possibilities.

12. Occurence of derived CV combinations

13. Conclusions • Figure 4 differs from holistic coding in that individual CV transitions can indeed be fractioned into smaller parts also occuring in other CV sequences (= minimal pairs). • Minimal pairs reflect the existence of phonemes • the simulated phonetic constraints are not artefacts

14. Tendency toward complementary distribution of stops A sequential search for 48 syllables was undertaken to examine in particular the distribution of vowels for <?> and [g]. Figure 5 shows the results...

15. Tendency toward complementary distribution of stops

16. Conclusions The vowels are paired with the consonants in a complementary manner <?> combining with front vowels, [g] with back vowels. Only one exception occurs: [u], for which there is a phonemic contrast.

17. Final Conclusions • It is possible to simulate the emergence of phonetic structure • Simulations display the existence of phonetic segments such as phonemes and allophones.