Signal evolution within the word
Andy Wedel (University of Arizona)
Tuesday 17 January 2017, 11:00–12:30
1.17 Dugald Stewart Building
Languages have been shown to optimize their lexicons over time with respect to the amount of signal allocated to words relative to their informativity: words that are on average less predictable in context tend to be longer, while those that are on average more predictable tend to be shorter (Piantadosi et al 2011, cf. Zipf 1935). Further, psycholinguistic research has shown that listeners are able to incrementally process words as they are heard, progressively updating inferences about what word is intended as the phonetic signal unfolds in time. As a consequence, phonetic cues early in the signal for a word are more informative about word-identity because they are less constrained by previous segmental context. This suggests that languages should not only optimize the total amount of signal allocated to different words, but optimize the distribution of that information across the word. Specifically, words that are on average less predictable in context should preferentially target highly informative phonetic cues early in the word, while preserving a ‘long tail’ of redundant cues later in the word. In this talk I will review recent evidence that this is the case in English. Further, languages show a strong tendency to develop phonological patterns which support phonetic cue informativity at the beginnings of words, while reduce cue informativity later in words. I will argue that this typological tendency plausibly arises from this word-level phenomenon.