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Modelling Mandarin speakers’ phonotactic knowledge

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 September 2021

Shuxiao Gong Open the ORCID record for Shuxiao Gong [Opens in a new window]  and
Jie Zhang Open the ORCID record for Jie Zhang [Opens in a new window]
Shuxiao Gong*
Affiliation:
University of Kansas
Jie Zhang*
Affiliation:
University of Kansas
*
*E-mail: gong@ku.edu, zhang@ku.edu.
*E-mail: gong@ku.edu, zhang@ku.edu.
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Abstract

This paper investigates the nature of native Mandarin Chinese speakers’ phonotactic knowledge via an experimental study and formal modelling of the experimental results. Results from a phonological well-formedness judgement experiment suggest that Mandarin speakers’ phonotactic knowledge is sensitive not only to lexical statistics, but also to grammatical principles such as systematic and accidental phonotactic constraints, allophonic restrictions and segment–tone co-occurrence restrictions. We employ the UCLA Phonotactic Learner to model Mandarin speakers’ phonotactic knowledge, and compare the model's well-formedness predictions with speakers’ judgements. The disparity between the model's predictions and the well-formedness ratings from the experiment indicates that grammatical principles and the lexicon are still not sufficient to explain all of the variations in the speakers’ judgements. We argue that multiple biases, such as naturalness bias, allophony bias and suprasegmental bias, are effective during phonotactic learning.

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Phonology , Volume 38 , Issue 2 , May 2021 , pp. 241 - 275
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Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

We thank an associate editor of Phonology and three anonymous reviewers, whose comments and critiques have improved the quality and clarity of this paper. For helpful discussions, we thank San Duanmu, Bruce Hayes, Allard Jongman, James Myers, Joan Sereno, Annie Tremblay, James White and members of the KU Experimental Linguistics Seminar, as well as audiences at the 7th Annual Meeting on Phonology, the 24th Annual Mid-Continental Phonetics and Phonology Conference and the 27th Annual Meeting of the International Association of Chinese Linguistics, where the experimental results of this paper were presented. We are also grateful to Chulong Liu and Yilei Shen for their support in this project.

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