Using Information Theory to Characterize Prosodic Typology: The Case of Tone, Pitch-Accent and Stress-Accent
This paper argues that the relationship between lexical identity and prosody -- one well-studied parameter of linguistic variation -- can be characterized using information theory. We predict that languages that use prosody to make lexical distinctions should exhibit a higher mutual information between word identity and prosody, compared to languages that don't. We test this hypothesis in the domain of pitch, which is used to make lexical distinctions in tonal languages, like Cantonese. We use a dataset of speakers reading sentences aloud in ten languages across five language families to estimate the mutual information between the text and their pitch curves. We find that, across languages, pitch curves display similar amounts of entropy. However, these curves are easier to predict given their associated text in the tonal languages, compared to pitch- and stress-accent languages, and thus the mutual information is higher in these languages, supporting our hypothesis. Our results support perspectives that view linguistic typology as gradient, rather than categorical.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Logical Transductions for the Typology of Ditransitive Prosody
Given the empirical landscape of possible prosodic parses, this paper examines the computations required to formalize the mapping from syntactic structure to prosodic structure. In particular, we use logical tree transdu…
A Multimodal Reasoning Typology for Grounding Chart-Image Coherence in Science Communication
Charts and images appear together throughout scientific publications, yet most computational work does not characterize their coherence. We argue that a chart, its accompanying image, and the caption that links them form…
Multimodal ReasoningDouble Articulation Analyzer with Prosody for Unsupervised Word and Phoneme Discovery
Infants acquire words and phonemes from unsegmented speech signals using segmentation cues, such as distributional, prosodic, and co-occurrence cues. Many pre-existing computational models that represent the process tend…
Language ModellingTime SeriesTime Series AnalysisNon-verbal information in spontaneous speech -- towards a new framework of analysis
Non-verbal signals in speech are encoded by prosody and carry information that ranges from conversation action to attitude and emotion. Despite its importance, the principles that govern prosodic structure are not yet ad…
speech-recognitionSpeech RecognitionA Grounded Typology of Word Classes
We propose a grounded approach to meaning in language typology. We treat data from perceptual modalities, such as images, as a language-agnostic representation of meaning. Hence, we can quantify the function--form relati…