Similar Place Avoidance: A statistical universal

Pozdniakov, Konstantin; Segerer, Guillaume

doi:10.1515/lingty.2007.025

Cited by 25 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…Even repetition of consonants within a word is avoided to some degree (Bonatti, Peña, Nespor, & Mehler, 2007). For example, many languages have disproportionally fewer roots containing consonants drawn from the same place of articulation than those with placedifferentiated consonants (MacNeilage et al, 2000;Monaghan & Zuidema, 2015;Rousset, 2004;Pozdniakov & Segerer, 2007). The tendency for lexicons to avoid similar-sound repetition has led phonologists to propose the Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP; Leben, 1973;McCarthy, 1986), a constraint that bans morpheme-internal sequences of elements (e.g., consonants, tones) that share a phonological feature in underlying representations.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reduplicated Words Are Easier to Learn

Ota

Skarabela

2016

Language Learning and Development

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Infants' disposition to learn repetitions in the input structure has been demonstrated in pattern generalization (e.g., learning the pattern ABB from the token ledidi). This study tested whether a repetition advantage can also be found in lexical learning (i.e., learning the word lele vs. ledi). Twenty-four English-learning infants (mean age: 18.5 months) were exposed to novel word-object mappings involving either a reduplicated CVCV word (e.g., neenee) or a nonreduplicated CVCV word (e.g, bolay). Infants were more adept at learning word-object mappings with a reduplicated word than with a nonreduplicated word. A follow-up corpus analysis of infant-directed speech showed that this preference could not be attributed to the frequency patterns of reduplicated words or syllables in the linguistic input. These findings indicate that an experience-independent bias toward repeated elements plays an important role not only in pattern generalization but also in word learning.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reduplicated Words Are Easier to Learn

Ota

Skarabela

2016

Language Learning and Development

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“…For ease of readability the results are presented in Table 5 following a convention introduced by Pozdniakov and Segerer (2007). Rather than presenting O/E ratios, Pozdniakov and Segerer measure the discrepancy between observed and expected values and express it as a positive or negative percentage.…”

Section: Indo-aryanmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Table 9 shows the cooccurrence of coronal stops and retroflex sonorants in #C 1 V(N)C 2 sequences from eight Dravidian languages of the Northern, South-Central and Central groups. Again, for ease of readability the results are presented following the convention of Pozdniakov and Segerer (2007).…”

Section: Dravidianmentioning

confidence: 99%

Retroflex consonant harmony: An areal feature in South Asia

Arsenault

2015

Journal of South Asian Languages and Linguistics

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Retroflexion is a well-known areal feature of South Asia. Most South Asian languages, regardless of their genetic affiliation, contrast retroflex consonants with their non-retroflex dental counterparts. However, South Asian languages differ in the phonotactic restrictions that they place on retroflex consonants. This paper presents evidence that a large number of South Asian languages have developed a co-occurrence restriction on coronal obstruents that can be described as retroflex consonant harmony. In these languages, roots containing two non-adjacent coronal stops are primarily limited to those with two dentals (T…T) or two retroflexes (Ṭ…Ṭ), while those containing a combination of dental and retroflex stops are avoided (*T…Ṭ, *Ṭ…T). Historical-comparative evidence indicates that long-distance retroflex assimilation has contributed to the development of this phonotactic pattern (T…Ṭ → Ṭ…Ṭ). In addition, the paper demonstrates that the distribution of languages with and without retroflex consonant harmony is geographic in nature, not genetic. Retroflex consonant harmony is characteristic of most languages in the northern half of the South Asian subcontinent, regardless of whether they are Indo-Aryan, Dravidian or Munda (but not Tibeto-Burman). It is not characteristic of Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages in the south. Thus, retroflex consonant harmony constitutes an areal feature within South Asia.

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“…These restrictions have been found in several genetically unrelated languages, e.g., Arabic ( (Greenberg 1950), (McCarthy 1988)), Russian (Padgett 1995), and Javanese ( (Uhlenbeck 1950), (Mester 1986)). Indeed, Pozdniakov & Segerer (2007) argue that such restrictions are statistical universals of language. The question of how to formalize these restrictions is a matter of recent debate (Pierrehumber 1993, Frisch et al 2004, Coetzee & Pater 2008, see Alderete & Frisch 2007 for a review).…”

Section: Consonant-consonant Co-occurrence Across Syllablesmentioning

confidence: 99%