Complex Segment Learner

Complex Segment Learner

Mbay (Nilo-Saharan)

The Mbay simulation has its own section in the paper. The corpus comprises 4,046 distinct lexical items and is from Keegan's (1996) Mbay-English dictionary. The dictionary was hand-entered into a text file and filtered to exclude proper nouns and loanwords. Mbay is unusual among the world's languages in that it has a heterorganic prenasalized stop [nɟ], as well as homorganic [mb], [nd], and [ŋg]. For more information on Mbay phonology as well as arguments that nasal-stop sequences function as single segments, see Keegan's (1997) grammar of the language.

Simulation data at a glance

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Simulation nameInitial state Learning DataInitial state features
only version LearningData.txt Features.txt

Simulation details for Mbay

Input:

LearningData.txt | Features.txt

Summary of iterations:

IterationLearning Data producedFeatures producedInseparabilityNew Segments addedSegments removed
1 LearningData.txt Features.txt [download] [view] nɟ, nd, mb, ŋɡ None
2 No new learning data No new features [download] [view] None None

Summary of inventory changes

StageConsonant set
Inputh w j ɡ k ɟ t d ɗ b p ɓ s l r n m ŋ
Outputh w j ɡ k ɟ t d ɗ b p ɓ s l r n m ŋ nɟ nd mb ŋɡ

Simulation Plots

/media/mbay/simulation/insep_plots.png