{"pk":49286,"title":"Sub-phonemic featural dimensions mediate consonantal co-occurrence biases in a cross-linguistically consistent manner","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Studies of segmental co-occurrence constraints have consistently\nproduced evidence consistent with a cross-linguistic\nanti-similarity bias for consonants (e.g. Frisch et al. (2004),\nPozdniakov & Segerer (2007), Walter (2010), Doucette et al.\n(2024)). The current study tests whether, in spite of this universal\nsimilarity avoidance bias, there are cross-linguistically\nconsistent featural harmony biases the world's lexicons. In\nparticular, we test for the presence of a nasal consonant harmony\nbias, given the fact that categorical nasal consonant harmony\nis attested in multiple language families and that nasal\nharmony is phonetically-motivated. A Bayesian negative binomial\nmodel of 91 typologically diverse languages' type frequencies\nfor two-consonant words shows evidence of a weak\nbut reliable cross-linguistic bias in favor of nasal harmony,\nas well as a comparable bias in favor of voicing harmony.\nThe findings also show patterns consistent with a similarityavoidance\nbias, most notably a strong cross-linguistic bias\nagainst coronal harmony. Taken together, these findings support\nthe notion that similarity-based co-occurrence constraints\nmay be feature dependent in cross-linguistically consistent\nways, and more generally that featural dimensions are relevant\nfor understanding the role of segmental redundancy in lexicons.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Linguistics; Phonology; Bayesian modeling; Corpus studies"}],"section":"Papers with Oral Presentation","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6wd6d5z1","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Bruno","middle_name":"","last_name":"Ferenc Segedin","name_suffix":"","institution":"Brown University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2025-01-01T19:00:00+01:00","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/49286/galley/37247/download/"}]}