Department of English and American Studies, University of Vienna, Austria.
Department of Contemporary English Language, Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland.
Lang Speech. 2021 Sep;64(3):693-704. doi: 10.1177/0023830920944445. Epub 2020 Aug 1.
Two prominent statistical laws in language and other complex systems are Zipf's law and Heaps' law. We investigate the extent to which these two laws apply to the linguistic domain of phonotactics-that is, to sequences of sounds. We analyze phonotactic sequences with different lengths within words and across word boundaries taken from a corpus of spoken English (Buckeye). We demonstrate that the expected relationship between the two scaling laws can only be attested when boundary spanning phonotactic sequences are also taken into account. Furthermore, it is shown that Zipf's law exhibits both high goodness-of-fit and a high scaling coefficient if sequences of more than two sounds are considered. Our results support the notion that phonotactic cognition employs information about boundary spanning phonotactic sequences.
语言和其他复杂系统中的两个突出的统计规律是齐夫定律和海普斯定律。我们研究了这两个定律在音韵学的语言领域，即声音序列中的应用程度。我们分析了取自英语口语语料库（Buckeye）的单词内和词间不同长度的音韵序列。我们证明，只有考虑跨越边界的音韵序列时，才能证明这两个标度定律之间的预期关系。此外，如果考虑超过两个音的序列，齐夫定律则表现出很好的拟合优度和较高的标度系数。我们的结果支持这样一种观点，即音韵认知利用了跨越边界的音韵序列的信息。
