Phonotactic Complexity across Dialects

Ryan Soh-Eun Shim, Kalvin Chang, David R. Mortensen

Abstract
Received wisdom in linguistic typology holds that if the structure of a language becomes more complex in one dimension, it will simplify in another, building on the assumption that all languages are equally complex (Joseph and Newmeyer, 2012). We study this claim on a micro-level, using a tightly-controlled sample of Dutch dialects (across 366 collection sites) and Min dialects (across 60 sites), which enables a more fair comparison across varieties. Even at the dialect level, we find empirical evidence for a tradeoff between word length and a computational measure of phonotactic complexity from a LSTM-based phone-level language model—a result previously documented only at the language level. A generalized additive model (GAM) shows that dialects with low phonotactic complexity concentrate around the capital regions, which we hypothesize to correspond to prior hypotheses that language varieties of greater or more diverse populations show reduced phonotactic complexity. We also experiment with incorporating the auxiliary task of predicting syllable constituency, but do not find an increase in the strength of the negative correlation observed.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.1115
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
12734–12748
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1115
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ryan Soh-Eun Shim, Kalvin Chang, and David R. Mortensen. 2024. Phonotactic Complexity across Dialects. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 12734–12748, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Phonotactic Complexity across Dialects (Shim et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/add_acl24_videos/2024.lrec-main.1115.pdf
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