Using Information Theory to Characterize Prosodic Typology: The Case of Tone, Pitch-Accent and Stress-Accent

Ethan Wilcox; Cui Ding; Giovanni Acampa; Tiago Pimentel; Alex Warstadt; Tamar I. Regev

doi:10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.1192

January 1, 2025Open Access

Using Information Theory to Characterize Prosodic Typology: The Case of Tone, Pitch-Accent and Stress-Accent

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Key Points

To formalize and evaluate the typological boundaries separating tone, pitch-accent, and stress-accent languages using quantitative information-theoretic measures.
Extracted prosodic features across typologically diverse languages representing tone, pitch-accent, and stress-accent systems.
Computed information-theoretic metrics, including entropy and conditional entropy, to measure the predictability and communicative load of acoustic pitch and stress contours.
Information-theoretic quantities reveal a graded spectrum of prosodic information distribution across languages rather than strictly discrete typological bins.
Lexical tone systems display significantly greater prosodic entropy and communicative capacity per syllable than pitch-accent and stress-accent systems.

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Implication

Computational linguistic analysis demonstrates distinct information-theoretic boundaries between tone, pitch-accent, and stress-accent languages, highlighting formal statistical constraints on...

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Wilcox et al. (2025) studied this question.

synapsesocial.com/papers/6a0ad22e4a081dac3aac9b31 https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.1192

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Using Information Theory to Characterize Prosodic Typology: The Case of Tone, Pitch-Accent and Stress-Accent

Key Points

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Implication

Abstract

Discussion

Cite This Study

Using Information Theory to Characterize Prosodic Typology: The Case of Tone, Pitch-Accent and Stress-Accent

Key Points

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Implication

Abstract

Discussion

Cite This Study

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