Predicting Vowel Systems: An Acoustic Analysis of the Vowels of Mebêngôkre and Panará
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper has both a descriptive and a theoretical goal. The first is to provide novel typological data on two severely understudied languages of the Jê family, Mebêngôkre and Panará, through an acoustic analysis of the vowels of the two languages. The second is to determine whether the predictions made by the Dispersion-Focalization Theory of vowel systems (DFT, Schwartz et al. 1997a) can account for the organization of the vowel systems of these two languages. Acoustic results show that neither Mebêngôkre nor Panará has a true low nasal vowel, and that the acoustic space of the nasal vowel systems of both languages is reduced in the F1 dimension. The DFT fails to predict this typological observation, which is commonly observed in nasal vowel inventories of the world’s languages (Beddor 1982, Kingston 2007). The author proposes that the acoustic space of phonologically nasal vowels is constrained in the F1 dimension. This small modification to the DFT allows the principles governing the organization of oral vowel systems to apply normally in nasal vowels, albeit in a reduced space. This prediction is consistent with the data observed from natural languages, in which we observe a larger number of contrasts among the F2 dimension than the F1 dimension for nasal vowels.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".