Statistical analysis of Chinese phonemic contrast.

摘要: Two phonemes that may induce minimal pairs constitute a phonemic contrast. Some contrasts disappear for various reasons, which, nevertheless, does not seem to seriously impede linguistic communication. Does it mean the disappeared are unimportant? In our study, we calculated proportions (here termed degree of contrast) words in which two contrastive occur and explored role combinations. The contrast reflects relation between phonemes. Our results indicate (1) average Chinese declines exponentially with increase number syllables, rapidly approaching zero; (2) consonants differ from each other only one distinctive feature absent some dialects is significantly higher than consonants; (3) different dialects; (4) combinations exhibit high sparsity, increases syllables approaches 1. All these show sparsity low human languages leave enough room new words, appear but also contribute effective reliable communication, because few mistakes likely cause wrong decoding (sound recognition) failed