Stability and Fluctuations in a Simple Model of Phonetic Category Change
This provides insights into phonetic stability for linguists, but it is incremental as it builds on existing models and prepares for more complex ones.
The paper tackles the problem of how phonetic categories change over time in a population, using a simple exemplar model to show that phonemes do not become extinct once initialized, and it quantitatively studies boundary fluctuations.
In spoken languages, speakers divide up the space of phonetic possibilities into different regions, corresponding to different phonemes. We consider a simple exemplar model of how this division of phonetic space varies over time among a population of language users. In the particular model we consider, we show that, once the system is initialized with a given set of phonemes, that phonemes do not become extinct: all phonemes will be maintained in the system for all time. This is in contrast to what is observed in more complex models. Furthermore, we show that the boundaries between phonemes fluctuate and we quantitatively study the fluctuations in a simple instance of our model. These results prepare the ground for more sophisticated models in which some phonemes go extinct or new phonemes emerge through other processes.