This paper presents instrumental measurements based on a consonant/vowel segmentation for eight languages. The measurements suggest that intuitive rhythm types reflect specific phonological properties, which in turn are signaled by the acoustic/phonetic properties of speech. The data support the notion of rhythm classes and also allow the simulation of infant language discrimination, consistent with the hypothesis that newborns rely on a coarse segmentation of speech. A hypothesis is proposed regarding the role of rhythm perception in language acquisition.

This article describes an approach to connectionist language research which relies on the development of grammar formalisms rather than computer models. From formulations of the fundamental theoretical commitments of connectionism and of generative grammar, it is argued that these two paradigms are mutually compatible. Integrating the basic assumptions of the paradigms results in formal theories of grammar that centrally incorporate a certain degree of connectionist computation. Two such grammar formalisms --- Harmonic Grammar (Legendre, Miyata and Smolensky, 1990ab) and Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky, 1991, 1993) --- are briefly introduced to illustrate grammar-based approaches to connectionist language research. The strengths and weaknesses of grammar-based research and more traditional model-based research are argued to be complementary, suggesting a significant role for both strategies in the spectrum of connectionist language research. This article is addressed to basic ...

A computational model of emergent syllable systems is developed based on a set of functional constraints on syllable systems and the assumption that language structure emerges through cumulative change over time. The constraints were derived from general communicative factors as well as from the phonetic principles of perceptual distinctiveness and articulatory ease. Through evolutionary optimization, the model generated mock vocabularies optimized for the given constraints. Several simulations were run to understand how these constraints might dene the emergence of universals and variation in complex sound systems. The predictions were that (1) CV syllables would be highly frequent in all vocabularies evolved under the constraints; (2) syllables with consonant clusters, consonant codas and vowel onsets would occur much less frequently; (3) a relationship would exist between the number of syllable types in a vocabulary and the average word length in the vocabulary; (4) dierent syllable types would emerge according to, what we termed, an iterative principle of syllable structure and their frequency would be directly related to their complexity; and (5) categorical dierences would emerge between vocabularies evolved under the same constraints. Simulation results conrmed these predictions and provided novel insights into why regularities and dierences may occur across languages. Specically, the model suggested that both language universals and variation are consistent with a set of functional constraints that are xed relative to one another. Language univer-

We study a number of natural language decipherment problems using unsupervised learning. These include letter substitution ciphers, character code conversion, phonetic decipherment, and word-based ciphers with relevance to machine translation. Straightforward unsupervised learning techniques most often fail on the first try, so we describe techniques for understanding errors and significantly increasing performance. 1

Abstract not found

An approach to automatic detection of syllable boundaries is presented. We demonstrate the use of several manually constructed grammars trained with a novel algorithm combining the advantages of treebank and bracketed corpora training. We investigate the effect of the training corpus size on the performance of our system. The evaluation shows that a hand-written grammar performs better on finding syllable boundaries than does a treebank grammar. 1

Many languages respect the generalization that some or all unstressed vowels are deleted. This generalization proves elusive in classic Optimality Theory, however. The source of the problem is classic OT’s parallel evaluation, which requires that the effects of stress assignment and syncope be optimized together. This article argues for a version of OT called Harmonic Serialism, in which the effects of stress assignment and syncope can and must be evaluated sequentially. The results are potentially applicable to other domains where process interaction is best understood in derivational terms.

but in fact this is still an early draft, version 0.56, August 1 2001. Please do

This book is about the interface between natural language and the sensorimotor system. It is obvious that there is an interface between language and sensorimotor cognition, because we can talk about what we see and do. The main proposal in the book is that the interface is more direct than is commonly assumed. To argue for this proposal I focus on a simple concrete episode—a man grabbing a cup—which can be reported in a simple transitive sentence (e.g. the English sentence The man grabbed a cup). In the first part of the book I present a detailed model of the sensorimotor processes involved in experiencing this episode, both as the agent bringing it about and as an observer watching it happen. The model draws on a large body of research in neuroscience and psychology. I also present a model of the syntactic structure of the associated transitive sentence, developed within the entirely separate discipline of theoretical linguistics. This latter model is a version of Chomsky’s ‘Minimalist ’ syntactic theory, which assumes that a sentence reporting the episode has the same underlying syntactic structure (called ‘logical form’) regardless of which language it is in. My main proposal is that these two independently motivated models are in fact closely

iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am very pleased to have had the encouragement and support of a committee of three linguists for whom I have the greatest respect and admiration: Mark Liberman, William Labov and Eugene Buckley. Each of them made my transition back to Penn pleasant after what seemed like a long absence. It was a great pleasure to have Mark Randolph both as an external reader and as a colleague at Motorola. Mark’s work at MIT a decade ago has served as an inspiration to me. Orhan Karaali made this dissertation possible in this millennium. As my manager for over two years at Motorola, Orhan insisted on making my dissertation a priority at work. Harry Bliss provided his voice to this project and our whole group is very grateful for his patience and cooperation. My colleagues at Motorola listened to my ideas and provided technical and theoretical assistance at every turn: Noel