R. Harald Baayen

Paula Orzechowska, R. Harald Baayen

This study investigates the relationship between the phonological and morphological structure of Polish words and their meanings using Distributional Semantics. In the present analysis, we ask whether there is a relationship between the form properties of words containing consonant clusters and their meanings. Is the phonological and morphonological structure of complex words mirrored in semantic space? We address these questions for Polish, a language characterized by non-trivial morphology and an impressive inventory of morphologically-motivated consonant clusters. We use statistical and computational techniques, such as t-SNE, Linear Discriminant Analysis and Linear Discriminative Learning, and demonstrate that -- apart from encoding rich morphosyntactic information (e.g. tense, number, case) -- semantic vectors capture information on sub-lexical linguistic units such as phoneme strings. First, phonotactic complexity, morphotactic transparency, and a wide range of morphosyntactic categories available in Polish (case, gender, aspect, tense, number) can be predicted from embeddings without requiring any information about the forms of words. Second, we argue that computational modelling with the discriminative lexicon model using embeddings can provide highly accurate predictions for comprehension and production, exactly because of the existence of extensive information in semantic space that is to a considerable extent isomorphic with structure in the form space.

Yuxin Lu, Zhexuan Li, R. Harald Baayen

The neutral, or floating, tone of Mandarin Chinese is a tone with an enigmatic set of properties. It has been described as a reduced tone, or as a tone that sometimes is lexically fixed but that can also be toneless. In two-syllable words, it is found only on the second syllable, but single-syllable words can also have the neutral tone. We present a corpus-based study of the phonetic realization of the neutral tone in spontaneous conversational speech corpora of Beijing Mandarin and Taiwan Mandarin. We show that the neutral tone has its own tonal target, just as the four lexical tones of Mandarin. We also show that disyllabic words with a neutral tone have pitch contours that have a pitch component that depends on the tone on the first syllable, just as has been observed for two-syllable words with a lexical tone on the second syllable (Chuang et al., 2026). Furthermore, words with a floating tone have word-specific pitch signatures, which have also been documented for single-syllable words (Jin et al., 2026) as well as two-syllable words (Lu et al., 2026b). These word-specific pitch signatures are shown to be predictable to some extent from words' contextualized embeddings, as previously reported for lexical tones (Chuang et al., 2026; Lu et al., 2026b). As there is also considerable variability in the realization of lexical tones, we propose that the neutral tone is, in fact, a lexical tone in both Taiwan Mandarin and Beijing Mandarin. We document both similarities and differences in the realization of the floating tone in these two varieties and provide evidence, using contextualized embeddings, that some of the observed differences may arise from differences in the meanings of the words as used in the two corpora.