Titel
Scaling Laws for Phonotactic Complexity in Spoken English Language Data
Autor*in
Kamil Kaźmierski
Department of Contemporary English Language, Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University
Abstract
Two prominent statistical laws in language and other complex systems are Zipf’s law and Heaps’ law. We investigate the extent to which these two laws apply to the linguistic domain of phonotactics—that is, to sequences of sounds. We analyze phonotactic sequences with different lengths within words and across word boundaries taken from a corpus of spoken English (Buckeye). We demonstrate that the expected relationship between the two scaling laws can only be attested when boundary spanning phonotactic sequences are also taken into account. Furthermore, it is shown that Zipf’s law exhibits both high goodness-of-fit and a high scaling coefficient if sequences of more than two sounds are considered. Our results support the notion that phonotactic cognition employs information about boundary spanning phonotactic sequences.
Stichwort
Heaps’ lawZipf’s lawphonotacticsdiversityinventory size
Objekt-Typ
Sprache
Englisch [eng]
Persistent identifier
phaidra.univie.ac.at/o:1214273
Erschienen in
Titel
Language and Speech
ISSN
0023-8309
Erscheinungsdatum
2020
Publication
SAGE Publications
Erscheinungsdatum
2020
Zugänglichkeit
Rechte
Rechteangabe
© The Author(s) 2020
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