# Phonotactic probability

The phonotactic probability is likelihood of observing a sequence in a given language. It's typically calculated as either the co-occurrence probability of a series of phones or diphones, or the cumulative transitional probability of moving from one portion of the sequence to the next.

This package currently provides the co-occurrence method of calculating the phonotactic probability, and this can be done taking the position of a phone or diphone into account, or just looking at the co-occurrence probability.

## Examples

using LexicalCharacteristics
sample_corpus = [
["K", "AE1", "T"], # cat
["K", "AA1", "B"], # cob
["B", "AE1", "T"], # bat
["T", "AE1", "T", "S"], # tats
["M", "AA1", "R", "K"], # mark
["K", "AE1", "B"], # cab
]
freq = [1,1,1,1,1,1]
p = prod([4,4,4] / 20)
phnprb(sample_corpus, freq, [["K", "AE1", "T"]])

1 rows × 2 columns

QueryProbability
Array…Any
1["K", "AE1", "T"]0.008

In this example, each phone has 4 observations in the corpus, and the likelihood of observing each of those phones is 4/20. Because there are 3, the phonotactic probability of this sequence is ${\frac{4}{20}}^3$, which is 0.008. Floating point errors sometimes occur in the arithmetic in programming, but this is unavoidable.

using LexicalCharacteristics
sample_corpus = [
["K", "AE1", "T"], # cat
["K", "AA1", "B"], # cob
["B", "AE1", "T"], # bat
["T", "AE1", "T", "S"], # tats
["M", "AA1", "R", "K"], # mark
["K", "AE1", "B"], # cab
]
freq = [1,1,1,1,1,1]
p = prod([3,2,3,2]/26)
phnprb(sample_corpus, freq, [["K", "AE1", "T"]]; nchar=2)

1 rows × 2 columns

QueryProbability
Array…Any
1["K", "AE1", "T"]7.87788e-5

In this example here, the input is padded so that the beginning and ending of the word are taken into account when calculating the phonotactic probability. There are 3 counts of [. K] (where [.] is the word boundary symbol), 2 counts of [K AE1], 3 counts of [AE1 T], and 2 counts of [T .]. There are 26 total diphones observed in the corpus, so the phonotactic probability is calculated as

$\frac{3}{26} \times \frac{2}{26} \times \frac{3}{26} \times \frac{2}{26} \,.$

## Function documentation

LexicalCharacteristics.phnprbMethod
phnprb(corpus::Array, frequencies::Array, queries::Array; positional=false,

Calculates the phonotactic probability for each item in a list of queries based on a corpus

Arguments

• corpus The corpus on which to base the probability calculations
• frequencies The frequencies associated with each element in corpus
• queries The items for which the probability should be calculated

Keyword arguments

• positional Whether to consider where in the query a given phone appears

(e.g., should "K" as the first sound be considered a different category than "K" as the second sound?)

• nchar The number of characters for each n-gram that will be examined (e.g., 2 for diphones)