Bart de Boer - 2000 - Emergence of sound systems through self-organisation

de Boer, B. (2000) Emergence of sound systems through self-organisation. In Chris Knight and James R. Hurford and Michael Studdert-Kennedy, editors, The Evolutionary Emergence of Language: Social Function and the Origins of Linguistic Form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Paper at a Glance

Emergence of sound systems through selforganisation
Bart de Boer
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Pleinlaan 2, 1050 Brussel
bartb@arti.vub.ac.be
Introduction The research described in this paper tries to explain the emergence and structure of systems of speech sounds. It investigates how a coherent system of speech sounds can emerge in a popu lation of agents and how the constraints under which the system emerges impose structure through selforganisation. If selforganisation can explain structure, then innate and biologi cally evolved mechanisms are not necessary. This effectively decreases the number of linguistic phenomena that have to be explained by biological evolution. What are the phenomena that have to be explained by a theory of the emergence of speech sounds? The systems of speech sounds in the world's languages show remarkable regularities. First of all, certain sounds occur much more frequently than others. In the UPSID, (UCLA Pho nological Segment Inventory Database) a database that contains the phoneme inventories of 451 languages, (the first version with 317 languages is described in Maddieson 1984) the vow els [i], [a] and [u] appear in 87% , 87% and 82% of the languages, respectively while the vowels [y], [oe] and [ ] occur in only 5% , 2% and 9%of the languages. This holds even more for conso nants. Some consonants, e.g. [m] (94% ), [k] (89% ) or [j] (84% ) appear very frequently, while oth ers, e.g. [ ] (1 %), [ ] (1 %) and [ ] (1 %) appear very rarely. The sound systems of languages also display a fair amount of symmetry. If a language has a front unrounded vowel of a given height, for example an [e] (occurring in 27% of the languages), it is quite likely that it also has the corresponding back rounded vowel [o] (which occurs in 29% of all languages, but in 85% of the languages with [e]). In the case of consonants, if a language has a voiced stop at a given place of articulation, e.g. [d] (27% ) it ...

BibTex

@incollection{deboer00emergenceOf2,
  author={B. de Boer},
  title={Emergence of sound systems through self-organisation},
  year={2000},
  address={Cambridge},
  editor={Chris Knight and James R. Hurford and Michael Studdert-Kennedy},
  publisher={Cambridge University Press},
  booktitle={The Evolutionary Emergence of Language: Social Function and the Origins of Linguistic Form},
  url={http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~amag/langev/paper/deboer00emergenceOf2.html}
}

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