Tal Linzen, T. O’Donnell

EMNLP

Paper

Abstract

The phonotactics of a language describes the ways in which the sounds of the language combine to form possible morphemes and words. Humans can learn phonotactic patterns at the level of abstract classes, generalizing across sounds (e.g., “words can end in a voiced stop”). Moreover, they rapidly acquire these generalizations, even before they acquire soundspecific patterns. We present a probabilistic model intended to capture this early