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arXiv · 2005.03774

Phonotactic Complexity and its Trade-offs

Tiago Pimentel·Brian Roark·Ryan Cotterell
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Abstract

We present methods for calculating a measure of phonotactic complexity---bits per phoneme---that permits a straightforward cross-linguistic comparison. When given a word, represented as a sequence of phonemic segments such as symbols in the international phonetic alphabet, and a statistical model trained on a sample of word types from the language, we can approximately measure bits per phoneme using the negative log-probability of that word under the model. This simple measure allows us to compare the entropy across languages, giving insight into how complex a language's phonotactics are. Using a collection of 1016 basic concept words across 106 languages, we demonstrate a very strong negative correlation of -0.74 between bits per phoneme and the average length of words.

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Tiago Pimentel, Brian Roark, Ryan Cotterell. 2020-05-07. Phonotactic Complexity and its Trade-offs. https://doi.org/10.1162/tacl_a_00296

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