Complexity approaches, developed in physics and biology for almost two decades, show today a huge potential for investigating challenging issues in Humanities and Cognitive Sciences and obviously in the study of language(s). Theoretical approaches that integrate self-organization, emergence, non linearity, adaptive systems, information theory, etc., have already been developed to provide a unifying framework that sheds new light on the duality between linguistic diversity on the one hand and unique cognitive capacity of language processing on the other hand. Nevertheless, most of the linguistics literature written in this framework focuses on the syntactic level addressed through computational complexity or performance optimization, while other linguistic components have been somewhat neglected.In this context, the proposed volume draws on an interdisciplinary sketch of the phonetics-phonology interface in the light of complexity. Composed of several first-order contributions, it will consequently be a significant landmark at the time of the rise of several projects linking complexity and linguistics around the world.
Author(s): Ioana Chitoran, Francois Pellegrino, Egidio Marsico & Christophe Coupe
Series: Phonology and Phonetics
Edition: 1
Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
Year: 2009
Language: English
Pages: 391
Cover Page......Page 1
Title Page......Page 4
Copyright Info......Page 5
Table of contents......Page 6
Introduction......Page 8
Part 1: Complexity and phonological primitives......Page 26
Complexity in phonetics and phonology: gradience, categoriality, and naturalness......Page 28
Languages’ sound inventories: the devil in the details......Page 54
Signal dynamics in the production and perception of vowels......Page 66
Part 2: Typological approaches to measuring complexity......Page 90
Calculating phonological complexity......Page 92
Favoured syllabic patterns in the world’s languages and sensorimotor constraints......Page 118
Structural complexity of phonological systems......Page 148
Scale-free networks in phonological and orthographic wordform lexicons......Page 178
Part 3: Phonological representations in the light of complex adaptive systems......Page 198
The dynamical approach to speech perception: From fine phonetic detail to abstract phonological categories......Page 200
A dynamical model of change in phonological representations: The case of lenition......Page 226
Cross-linguistic trends in the perception of place of articulation in stop consonants: A comparison between Hungarian and French......Page 248
The complexity of phonetic features' organisation in reading......Page 274
Part 4: Complexity in the course of language acquisition......Page 304
Self-organization of syllable structure: a coupled oscillator model......Page 306
Internal and external influences on child language productions......Page 336
Emergent complexity in early vocal acquisition: Cross linguistic comparisons of canonical babbling......Page 360
Index......Page 384
List of Contributors......Page 390
