$Phonotactic probabilities in Mandarin syllables$

Anonymous

Abstract: In this study, a spoken data sample is computed via frequency-based probabilistic phonotactics in Mandarin syllables by categorizing the spoken dataset into 12 syllable structure types. Phonotactic probabilities are measured by the bigram or biphone frequencies with which phonological segments and phone sequences occur in word types in Mandarin. Spoken data drawn from 2,384,567 lexical items show that correlations between speech production measures and phonological/articulatory complexity are not found. Instead, phonotactic probabilities influence speech production processes in Mandarin speakers independent of phonological complexity.

Paper Type: short

Research Area: Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation

Contribution Types: Data analysis

Languages Studied: Taiwan Mandarin