Rethinking Phonotactic Complexity

WS 2019  ·  Tiago Pimentel, Brian Roark, Ryan Cotterell ·

In this work, we propose the use of phone-level language models to estimate phonotactic complexity{---}measured in bits per phoneme{---}which makes cross-linguistic comparison straightforward. We compare the entropy across languages using this simple measure, gaining insight on how complex different language{'}s phonotactics are. Finally, we show a very strong negative correlation between phonotactic complexity and the average length of words{---}Spearman rho=-0.744{---}when analysing a collection of 106 languages with 1016 basic concepts each.

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