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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Rory TurnbullORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
© 2022 The Author(s). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY)The French phonological rule of liaison, whereby certain underlying word-final consonants surface only when the following word starts with a vowel, sometimes creates homophony. For instance, un œuf 'an egg' and un neuf 'a nine' are both pronounced [ε.nœf ̃]. While homophony is cross-linguistically frequent, there is evidence that it is constrained in various ways. Here, we quantify liaison-induced homophony by comparing its occurrence in real French to that in a benchmark consisting of versions of French with modified liaison consonants. We find that liaison induces more homophony in the benchmark than in real French. This is the first evidence that a phonological rule that applies across words is subject to an anti-homophony bias.
Author(s): Peperkamp S, Antoine V, Turnbull R
Publication type: Conference Proceedings (inc. Abstract)
Publication status: Published
Conference Name: 44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Cognitive Diversity, CogSci 2022
Year of Conference: 2022
Pages: 2409-2415
Online publication date: 01/06/2022
Acceptance date: 02/04/2022
Date deposited: 30/01/2023
Publisher: The Cognitive Science Society
URL: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6s55q1n9
Series Title: Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society
