Paper

The organization of sound inventories: A study on obstruent gaps

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Abstract

This study explores the organizing principles of sound inventories by examining attested one-segment gaps in obstruent inventories. Models based on different theories of inventory organization are built and compared in a computational task where models make a binary decision to identify gaps and attested sounds. Results show that segment markedness, defined either in terms of grounded phonetic properties or typological frequencies, is a good predictor of whether a segment is likely to be gapped in an inventory. On the other hand, whether an attested segment, compared to a gapped segment, makes the feature representation more symmetric or economical, is not a good predictor of whether a segment is gapped. Finally, artificial neural networks that take inventories and segments as bags of feature values outperform all aforementioned models, demonstrating the extent to which the task of gap identification is learnable from distributional properties in the data.

Keywords: typology, obstruent, gap, feature economy, feature symmetry, markedness

How to Cite:

Wang, S., (2019) “The organization of sound inventories: A study on obstruent gaps”, Society for Computation in Linguistics 2(1), 195-204. doi: https://doi.org/10.7275/pbe8-zf60