These: Luc Boruta, Indicators of Allophony and Phonemehood

[Thierry Hamon]

Date: Mon, 10 Sep 2012 16:01:17 +0200
From: Luc Boruta <luc.boruta at inria.fr>
Message-ID: <48dc48fbec49f39962a1c729e467e13b at boruta.fr>

Bonjour,

j'ai le plaisir de vous annoncer la soutenance de ma thèse de doctorat
qui aura lieu le mercredi 26 septembre à 14h dans les locaux du Centre
de Recherches Interdisciplinaires (24, rue du Faubourg Saint-Jacques ;
salle 2006). Vous y êtes cordialement invités ainsi qu'au pot qui
suivra.

Indicators of Allophony and Phonemehood

Although we are only able to distinguish between a finite, small number
of sound categories—i.e. a given language's phonemes—no two sounds are
actually identical in the messages we receive. Given the pervasiveness
of sound-altering processes across languages—and the fact that every
language relies on its own set of phonemes—the question of the
acquisition of allophonic rules by infants has received a considerable
amount of attention in recent decades. How, for example, do
English-learning infants discover that the word forms [kæt] and [kat]
refer to the same animal species (i.e. cat), whereas [kæt] and [bæt]
(i.e. cat ~ bat) do not? What kind of cues may they rely on to learn
that [sıŋkıŋ] and [θıŋkıŋ] (i.e. sinking ~ thinking) can not refer to
the same action? The work presented in this dissertation builds upon the
line of computational studies initiated by Peperkamp et al. (2006),
wherein research efforts have been concentrated on the definition of
sound-to-sound dissimilarity measures indicating which sounds are
realizations of the same phoneme. We show that solving Peperkamp et
al.'s task does not yield a full answer to the problem of the discovery
of phonemes, as formal and empirical limitations arise from its pairwise
formulation. We proceed to circumvent these limitations, reducing the
task of the acquisition of phonemes to a partitioning-clustering problem
and using multidimensional scaling to allow for the use of individual
phones as the elementary objects. The results of various classification
and clustering experiments consistently indicate that effective
indicators of allophony are not necessarily effective indicators of
phonemehood. Altogether, the computational results we discuss suggest
that allophony and phonemehood can only be discovered from acoustic,
temporal, distributional, or lexical indicators when—on average—phonemes
do not have many allophones in a quantized representation of the input.

Cordialement,
- Luc Boruta, ALPAGE & LSCP

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