The UCI Phonotactic Calculator: An online tool for computing phonotactic metrics.

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Computational Linguistics
• Psycholinguistics

Background:

• Phonotactic models are crucial for understanding language structure.
• Existing tools for analyzing phonotactics often lack flexibility and user-friendliness.
• Researchers need accessible tools to analyze phonotactic patterns across diverse languages.

Purpose of the Study:

• Introduce the UCI Phonotactic Calculator (UCIPC), a novel online tool for quantifying phonotactic patterns.
• Evaluate the predictive power of different phonotactic metrics using the UCIPC.
• Compare UCIPC metrics against human judgments in nonce word acceptability studies.

Main Methods:

• Developed the UCI Phonotactic Calculator (UCIPC) with a user-friendly interface.
• Implemented a range of phonotactic metrics, including those considering segment position and word boundaries.
• Collected and analyzed data from eight published nonce word acceptability judgment studies across four languages.

Main Results:

• The UCIPC allows users to input custom training data for analysis.
• Metrics incorporating relative sound position and word boundaries significantly outperformed those based on absolute position.
• The tool successfully predicted human responses in cross-linguistic acceptability judgment tasks.

Conclusions:

• The UCIPC is a valuable and accessible resource for phonotactic analysis in linguistics.
• Phonotactic models that account for context (sound position, boundaries) are more psychologically realistic.
• The UCIPC facilitates experimental design and analysis in phonotactics and related fields.