This Wednesday’s installment of the Phonology Circle features a talk by Peter Graff and Emad Taliep. They will also be presenting the same talk earlier in the day, at Wednesday 10am in TedLab.<\/P><\/p>\n
Speakers: Peter Graff and Emad Taliep
\nTitle: English Speakers Track Absolute Frequency in Consonant Co-occurrence
\nDate: March 7 (Wednesday)
\nTime: 5:00\u00967:00
\nLocation: 32D831<\/P><\/p>\n
Phonotactic wellformedness has been shown to affect behavior in a
\nvariety of linguistic tasks such as word-likeness judgments (e.g.,
\nColeman and Pierrehumbert 1997). However, different researchers have
\noften employed rather different measures for phonotactic
\nwellformedness. This is particularly evident in the literature on
\nconsonant co-occurrence where two distinct measures of the
\nwellformedness of constellations of consonants separated by vowels
\n(e.g., p_t in pat) have been hypothesized. The first measure is the
\njoint probability (i.e., absolute frequency) of the constellation
\nP(C1_C2). Studies have found, e.g., that the joint probability of
\nlabial-coronal constellations (e.g. pat) is greater than the joint
\nprobability of coronal-labial ones (e.g. tap) in many different
\nlanguages (MacNeilage et. al 1999, Carrissimo-Bertola 2010) and
\nchildren as young as 7 months have been shown to be sensitive to this
\nphonotactic (Nazzi et al. 2009, Gonzalez Gomez and Nazzi 2012). The
\nsecond measure of wellformedness often employed is the observed-
\noverexpected ratio (O\/E) also known as pointwise mutual information
\n(PMI). The difference between PMI and joint probability is that PMI
\nrelativizes the joint probability of a constellation to the
\nindependent probabilities of its parts such that PMI(C1;C2) =
\nlog(P(C1_C2)\/(P(C1)\u00b7P(C2))), i.e. log(O\/E). PMI has been hypothesized
\nas a measure of wellformedness in studies of OCP-Place type phenomena
\n(e.g. Frisch et al. 2004, Coetzee and Pater 2008) and PMI-based
\ngeneralizations have been shown to affect wordlikeness judgments in
\nlanguages like Arabic (Frisch and Zawaydeh, 2001). In this study, we
\ncompare the patterning of PMI and joint probability in the English
\nlexicon and show that English CVCs present an ideal test-case for
\ndisambiguating the two measures. We present results from an online
\nwordlikeness judgment study (N=50) and find that speakers\u0092 judgments
\nare more accurately predicted by joint probability (i.e., absolute
\nfrequency) than PMI.<\/P><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This Wednesday’s installment of the Phonology Circle features a talk by Peter Graff and Emad Taliep. They will also be presenting the same talk earlier in the day, at Wednesday 10am in TedLab. Speakers: Peter Graff and Emad Taliep Title: English Speakers Track Absolute Frequency in Consonant Co-occurrence Date: March 7 (Wednesday) Time: 5:00\u00967:00 Location: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3780","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-talks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3780","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3780"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3780\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3782,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3780\/revisions\/3782"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}