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| Natura: | Preprint |
| Pubblicazione: |
2026
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| Accesso online: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02860 |
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| _version_ | 1866917309272031232 |
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| author | Martín, Fermín Moscoso del Prado Salhan, Suchir |
| author_facet | Martín, Fermín Moscoso del Prado Salhan, Suchir |
| contents | We demonstrate that the frequency distribution of phonemes across languages can be explained at both macroscopic and microscopic levels. Macroscopically, phoneme rank-frequency distributions closely follow the order statistics of a symmetric Dirichlet distribution whose single concentration parameter scales systematically with phonemic inventory size, revealing a robust compensation effect whereby larger inventories exhibit lower relative entropy. Microscopically, a Maximum Entropy model incorporating constraints from articulatory, phonotactic, and lexical structure accurately predicts language-specific phoneme probabilities. Together, these findings provide a unified information-theoretic account of phoneme frequency structure. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_02860 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | The Distribution of Phoneme Frequencies across the World's Languages: Macroscopic and Microscopic Information-Theoretic Models Martín, Fermín Moscoso del Prado Salhan, Suchir Computation and Language We demonstrate that the frequency distribution of phonemes across languages can be explained at both macroscopic and microscopic levels. Macroscopically, phoneme rank-frequency distributions closely follow the order statistics of a symmetric Dirichlet distribution whose single concentration parameter scales systematically with phonemic inventory size, revealing a robust compensation effect whereby larger inventories exhibit lower relative entropy. Microscopically, a Maximum Entropy model incorporating constraints from articulatory, phonotactic, and lexical structure accurately predicts language-specific phoneme probabilities. Together, these findings provide a unified information-theoretic account of phoneme frequency structure. |
| title | The Distribution of Phoneme Frequencies across the World's Languages: Macroscopic and Microscopic Information-Theoretic Models |
| topic | Computation and Language |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02860 |