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Actuation without production bias

  • James Kirby and Morgan Sonderegger
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Speech Dynamics
This chapter is in the book Speech Dynamics

Abstract

Phonetic production bias is the external force most commonly invoked in computational models of sound change despite the fact that it is not responsible for all, or even most, sound changes. Furthermore, the existence of production bias alone cannot account for how changes do or do not propagate throughout a speech community. While many other factors have been invoked by (socio) phoneticians, including but not limited to contact (between subpopulations) and differences in social evaluation (of variants, groups, or individuals), these are not typically modeled in computational simulations of sound change. In this chapter, we consider whether production biases have a unique dynamics in terms of how they impact the population-level spread of change in a setting where agents learn from multiple teachers. We show that, while the dynamics conditioned by production bias are not unique, it is not the case that all perturbing forces have the same dynamics: in particular, if social weight is a function of individual teachers and the correlation between a teacher’s social weight and the extent to which they realize a production bias is weak, change is unlikely to propagate. Nevertheless, it remains the case that changes initiated from different sources may display a similar dynamics. A more nuanced understanding of how population structure interacts with individual biases can thus provide a (partial) solution to the ‘non-phonologization problem’.

Abstract

Phonetic production bias is the external force most commonly invoked in computational models of sound change despite the fact that it is not responsible for all, or even most, sound changes. Furthermore, the existence of production bias alone cannot account for how changes do or do not propagate throughout a speech community. While many other factors have been invoked by (socio) phoneticians, including but not limited to contact (between subpopulations) and differences in social evaluation (of variants, groups, or individuals), these are not typically modeled in computational simulations of sound change. In this chapter, we consider whether production biases have a unique dynamics in terms of how they impact the population-level spread of change in a setting where agents learn from multiple teachers. We show that, while the dynamics conditioned by production bias are not unique, it is not the case that all perturbing forces have the same dynamics: in particular, if social weight is a function of individual teachers and the correlation between a teacher’s social weight and the extent to which they realize a production bias is weak, change is unlikely to propagate. Nevertheless, it remains the case that changes initiated from different sources may display a similar dynamics. A more nuanced understanding of how population structure interacts with individual biases can thus provide a (partial) solution to the ‘non-phonologization problem’.

Chapters in this book

  1. Frontmatter I
  2. Contents V
  3. On the nature of speech dynamics: approaches to studying synchronic variation and diachronic change 1
  4. Part 1: Empirical perspectives on diachronic change
  5. Fifty years of monophthong and diphthong shifts in Mainstream Australian English 17
  6. Coarticulation guides sound change: an acoustic-phonetic study of real-time change in word-initial /l/ over four decades of Glaswegian 49
  7. The impact of automated phonetic alignment and formant tracking workflows on sound change measurement 89
  8. One place, two speech communities: differing responses to sound change in Mainstream and Aboriginal Australian English in a small rural town 117
  9. Prosodic change in 100 years: the fall of the rise-fall in an Albanian variety 145
  10. Part 2: Factors conditioning synchronic variation
  11. Control of larynx height in vowel production revisited: a real-time MRI study 175
  12. Sheila’s roses (are in the paddick): reduced vowels in Australian English 207
  13. The future of the queen: how to pronounce “König✶innen” ‘gender-neutrally’ in German 245
  14. Synchronic variation and diachronic change: mora-counting and syllable-counting dialects in Japanese 273
  15. Reconstructing the timeline of a consonantal change in a German dialect: evidence from agent-based modeling 307
  16. Part 3: Theoretical approaches at the interface between synchronic variation and diachronic change
  17. On (mis)aligned innovative perception and production norms 343
  18. Phonological patterns and dependency relations may arise from aerodynamic factors 369
  19. Actuation without production bias 395
  20. Understanding the role of broadcast media in sound change 425
  21. Connecting prosody and duality of patterning in diachrony, typology, phylogeny, and ontogeny 453
  22. Index 483
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110765328-014

Chapters in this book

  1. Frontmatter I
  2. Contents V
  3. On the nature of speech dynamics: approaches to studying synchronic variation and diachronic change 1
  4. Part 1: Empirical perspectives on diachronic change
  5. Fifty years of monophthong and diphthong shifts in Mainstream Australian English 17
  6. Coarticulation guides sound change: an acoustic-phonetic study of real-time change in word-initial /l/ over four decades of Glaswegian 49
  7. The impact of automated phonetic alignment and formant tracking workflows on sound change measurement 89
  8. One place, two speech communities: differing responses to sound change in Mainstream and Aboriginal Australian English in a small rural town 117
  9. Prosodic change in 100 years: the fall of the rise-fall in an Albanian variety 145
  10. Part 2: Factors conditioning synchronic variation
  11. Control of larynx height in vowel production revisited: a real-time MRI study 175
  12. Sheila’s roses (are in the paddick): reduced vowels in Australian English 207
  13. The future of the queen: how to pronounce “König✶innen” ‘gender-neutrally’ in German 245
  14. Synchronic variation and diachronic change: mora-counting and syllable-counting dialects in Japanese 273
  15. Reconstructing the timeline of a consonantal change in a German dialect: evidence from agent-based modeling 307
  16. Part 3: Theoretical approaches at the interface between synchronic variation and diachronic change
  17. On (mis)aligned innovative perception and production norms 343
  18. Phonological patterns and dependency relations may arise from aerodynamic factors 369
  19. Actuation without production bias 395
  20. Understanding the role of broadcast media in sound change 425
  21. Connecting prosody and duality of patterning in diachrony, typology, phylogeny, and ontogeny 453
  22. Index 483
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