Learning the Dynamics of Vowel to Vowel Phonotactics

Is phonetic information encoded by distributional biases in the lexicon? Are phonotactic constraints robust enough to help a learner infer the phonic pattern of a language? Our work in progress attempts to shed light on these questions via: (i) statistical description of the distributional biases in phone sequences in a lexical database and (ii) connectionist simulation. The simulation focuses on V-to-V relations in V(C)’C(C)V phone strings since both harmony and contour constraints (the tendency for the vowels to share or avoid repetition of phonic properties, respectively) have been found in the distributional study (Albano, 2002).