This study by Cohen Priva et al. investigates the role of vowel co-occurrence patterns in the world’s languages, specifically examining whether these patterns reflect universal phonological pressures. The research challenges the notion that assimilatory processes, such as vowel harmony, primarily govern vowel distribution in lexicons. Instead, the authors find that while identical vowel sequences are over-represented across languages, there is no significant evidence for systematic biases related to vowel height or backness.

Utilizing large-scale corpus analyses of 92 lexicons from the XPF corpus and 107 Northern Eurasian languages from the NorthEuraLex Corpus, the study reveals that vowel identity is a prominent feature in lexical organization. Notably, the findings suggest that vowel similarity does not exert a strong influence on co-occurrence patterns, contrasting with previous research on consonant co-occurrence, which has shown distinct anti-similarity biases.

The results have significant implications for understanding phonological organization, suggesting that vowel identity may serve as a fundamental organizing principle in language, independent of featural harmony. This research contributes to the broader discourse on linguistic constraints and may inform computational models in phonology and language processing.

Source: glossa-journal.org