10-year study documents first 'unnatural gradient' phonotactic restriction in Tarma Quechua
begusgasper · x · 2026-10-27
A decade-in-the-making open-access paper by Gašper Beguš et al. documents a striking phonotactic restriction in Peru's Tarma Quechua: stops voice after voiceless stops and devoice after nasals.
The team built a new lexicon corpus showing the unnatural probabilistic pattern is statistically significant and somewhat productive, supported it with acoustic (spectrographic) analysis, and argue it is the first fully unnatural gradient phonotactic restriction ever reported — implying phonological theory needs probabilistic models with unnatural constraints. They also propose a goodness-of-fit framework for evaluating phonological analyses.
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