Statistical Evidence for Learnable Lexical Subclasses in Japanese

It has been proposed that the Japanese lexicon can be divided into etymologically defined sublexica on phonotactic and other grounds. However, the psychological reality of this sublexical analysis has been challenged by some authors, who have appealed to putative problems with the learnability of th...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Linguistic inquiry 2022-01, Vol.53 (1), p.87-120
Main Authors: Morita, Takashi, O’Donnell, Timothy J
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Bayesian learning
Etymology
Japanese
Japanese language
Learnability
lexical strata
Lexicon
naturalistic learnability
Phonotactics
Research design
variational inference
Citations: Items that this one cites
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:It has been proposed that the Japanese lexicon can be divided into etymologically defined sublexica on phonotactic and other grounds. However, the psychological reality of this sublexical analysis has been challenged by some authors, who have appealed to putative problems with the learnability of the system. In this study, we apply a commonly used clustering method to Japanese words and show that there is robust statistical evidence for the sublexica and, thereby, that such sublexica are learnable. The model is able to recover phonotactic properties of sublexica previously discussed in the literature, and also reveals hitherto unnoticed phonotactic properties that are characteristic of sublexical membership and can serve as a basis for future experimental investigations. The proposed approach is general and based purely on phonotactic information and thus can be applied to other languages.
ISSN:0024-3892
1530-9150
DOI:10.1162/ling_a_00401