Modeling the Co-occurrence Principles of the Consonant Inventories: A Complex Network Approach

Details Modeling the Co-occurrence Principles of the Consonant Inventories: A Complex Network Approach Modeling the Co-occurrence Principles of the Consonant Inventories: A Complex Network Approach

2006-06-15

arxiv.org/abs/physics/0606132v1

Physics

Physics and Society

15 pages, 9 figures, To be published in Int. Jour. of Modern Phy. C

Scientific paper

10.1142/S0129183107010395

Speech sounds of the languages all over the world show remarkable patterns of cooccurrence. In this work, we attempt to automatically capture the patterns of cooccurrence of the consonants across languages and at the same time figure out the nature of the force leading to the emergence of such patterns. For this purpose we define a weighted network where the consonants are the nodes and an edge between two nodes (read consonants) signify their co-occurrence likelihood over the consonant inventories. Through this network we identify communities of consonants that essentially reflect their patterns of co-occurrence across languages. We test the goodness of the communities and observe that the constituent consonants frequently occur in such groups in real languages also. Interestingly, the consonants forming these communities reflect strong correlations in terms of their features, which indicate that the principle of feature economy acts as a driving force towards community formation. In order to measure the strength of this force we propose an information theoretic definition of feature economy and show that indeed the feature economy exhibited by the consonant communities are substantially better than those if the consonant inventories had evolved just by chance.

Affiliated with

Also associated with

No associations

Rating

Modeling the Co-occurrence Principles of the Consonant Inventories: A Complex Network Approach does not yet have a rating. At this time, there are no reviews or comments for this scientific paper.

If you have personal experience with Modeling the Co-occurrence Principles of the Consonant Inventories: A Complex Network Approach, we encourage you to share that experience with our LandOfFree.com community. Your opinion is very important and Modeling the Co-occurrence Principles of the Consonant Inventories: A Complex Network Approach will most certainly appreciate the feedback.

Rate now

Comments { 0 }

Profile ID: LFWR-SCP-O-606971