Standard Russian (Indo-European)

Russian has its own section in the paper, as an example of a language where clear phonotactic arguments for affricates are lacking but statistical distributions are informative. Russian affricates are etymologically derived from dorsal and coronal stops, and they are quite frequent in the language--so much so that the learner identifies them without narrow transcriptions. While we discuss the two dictionary simulations in the paper, we also tried a simulation on a different data set: a kind of mock-up of a transcribed connected speech corpus. It was created by transcribing a bunch of Russian novels and removing the word boundaries. The main lesson we learn from this exercise is that the learner is sensitive to the type/token frequency distinction--it does not learn the same inventories when trained on words vs. connected speech. But we do not know which of the simulations produces the "right" result, since we do not know which representations the Russian speakers have for these sounds.

Simulation data at a glance

Click on simulation name to view additional simulation details.

Simulation name	Initial state Learning Data	Initial state features
Morphemes	LearningData.txt	Features.txt
Stems	LearningData.txt	Features.txt
Zaliznjak	LearningData.txt	Features.txt
Novel_Corpus	LearningData.txt	Features.txt
Tikhonov	LearningData.txt	Features.txt

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Simulation details for Russian morphemes

Summary of inventory changes

Stage	Consonant set
Input	p pʲ b bʲ m mʲ f fʲ v vʲ k kʲ ɡ ɡʲ x ɣ xʲ t tʲ d dʲ s sʲ z zʲ ʂ ʐ ɕ n ʑ nʲ r rʲ l lʲ j
Output	p pʲ b bʲ m mʲ f fʲ v vʲ k kʲ ɡ ɡʲ x xʲ t tʲ d dʲ s sʲ z zʲ ʂ ʐ ɕ n nʲ r rʲ l lʲ j tɕ

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Simulation details for Russian stems

Summary of inventory changes

Stage	Consonant set
Input	p pʲ b bʲ m mʲ f fʲ v vʲ k kʲ ɡ ɡʲ x ɣ xʲ t tʲ d dʲ s sʲ z zʲ ʂ ʐ ɕ n ʑ nʲ r rʲ l lʲ j
Output	p pʲ b bʲ m mʲ f fʲ v vʲ k kʲ ɡ ɡʲ x ɣ xʲ t tʲ d dʲ s sʲ z zʲ ʂ ʐ ɕ n ʑ nʲ r rʲ l lʲ j tɕ

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Simulation details for Russian zaliznjak

This simulation replicates the Tikhonov one, which is described in more detail in the paper.

Summary of inventory changes

Stage	Consonant set
Input	p pʲ b bʲ m mʲ f fʲ v vʲ k kʲ ɡ ɡʲ x ɣ xʲ t tʲ d dʲ s sʲ z zʲ ʂ ʐ ɕ n ʑ nʲ r rʲ l lʲ j
Output	p pʲ b bʲ m mʲ f fʲ v vʲ k kʲ ɡ ɡʲ x ɣ xʲ t tʲ d dʲ s sʲ z zʲ ʂ ʐ ɕ n ʑ nʲ r rʲ l lʲ j tɕ ts

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Simulation details for Russian novel_corpus

This simulation demonstrates that token frequencies are not sufficient for the learner to identify [ts] as an affricate in this corpus of Russian. The dictionaries make for a better data source than this connected speech model.

Summary of inventory changes

Stage	Consonant set
Input	p pʲ b bʲ m mʲ f fʲ v vʲ k kʲ ɡ ɡʲ x ɣ xʲ t tʲ d dʲ s sʲ z zʲ ʂ ʐ ɕ n ʑ nʲ r rʲ l lʲ j
Output	p pʲ b bʲ m mʲ f fʲ v vʲ k kʲ ɡ ɡʲ x ɣ xʲ t tʲ d dʲ s sʲ z zʲ ʂ ʐ ɕ n ʑ nʲ r rʲ l lʲ j tɕ

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Simulation details for Russian tikhonov

Summary of inventory changes

Stage	Consonant set
Input	p pʲ b bʲ m mʲ f fʲ v vʲ k kʲ ɡ ɡʲ x ɣ xʲ t tʲ d dʲ s sʲ z zʲ ʂ ʐ ɕ n ʑ nʲ r rʲ l lʲ j
Output	p pʲ b bʲ m mʲ f fʲ v vʲ k kʲ ɡ ɡʲ x ɣ xʲ t tʲ d dʲ s sʲ z zʲ ʂ ʐ ɕ n ʑ nʲ r rʲ l lʲ j tɕ ts

View the source code on GitHub