Does A Priori Phonological Knowledge Improve Cross-Lingual Robustness of Phonemic Contrasts?

Towards Induction of Structured Phoneme Inventories

“…A specially designed experiment for predicting contrasts in unvoiced labial consonants between Bengali and Spanish produced consistent and cross-lingually robust predictions (Johny et al, 2019), also for a variety of auditory representations (Gutkin, 2020), despite the conflicting status of some of the allophones of the phonemes in the experiment. Similarly robust were contrasts between front and back vowels, as well as the vowel height and continuant manner of articulation distinctions (Skidmore and Gutkin, 2020). The negative results include the cross-lingual prediction of retroflex consonants between the language families: retroflex predictor trained on Dravidian languages fails to reliably predict retroflex consonants in Bengali, conversely the predictor trained on Indo-Aryan languages is not reliable for Malayalam.…”