- Fengyue Zhao, Sam Tilsen. Syllable Position Prominence in Unsupervised Neural Network Segment Categorization. LabPhon 19. June 27 - 29 2024. Hanyang University, Seoul, South Korea. Motivation English obstruents exhibit diverse phonetic realizations across syllable positions, like /t/ and /p/ in words such as top and pot [1]. Linguistically we assume that phone identity—(e.g. /p/ vs. /t/) is a strong predictor of representational similarity, while syllable position—e.g. onset vs. coda—is perhaps a secondary factor. But is this always the case? Unsupervised learning in neural networks presents a practical approach for exploring this interplay, because it does not require presuppositions about phonological categories such as segments and syllable. Previous studies [2, 3] have demonstrated the capacity of neural networks to learn abstract representations from acoustic signals. This study employed an unsupervised autoencoder neural network to explore the correlation between phonological categories and network-learned representations. Surprisingly, we found that for consonants, syllable position plays a larger role in representational similarity than phone identity.
(This work was my honors thesis at UMass Amherst, and was advised by Dr. Brian Dillon and Dr. Ming Xiang .) - Fengyue Zhao, Brian Dillon, Ming Xiang. Probabilistic Listener: A Case of Chinese Mandarin Reflexive ziji. Ambiguity Resolution. 36th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing. March 9 - 11 2023. University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA.
