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Phonological and morphological roles modulate the perception of consonant variants

  • Anne Pycha EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: February 8, 2021
Linguistics Vanguard
From the journal Linguistics Vanguard Volume 7 Issue 1

Abstract

This study investigated how the perception of a sound is affected by its phonological and morphological roles within a word. We asked American English listeners (n = 24) to judge differences among phonetic variants of sounds [l], [n], [ɹ] in three word conditions: 1) at morpheme boundaries with a phonological process, such as [n] in down-ed, which triggers voicing agreement on the suffix, 2) internally without a process, such as [n] in mound, and 3) at morpheme boundaries alone, such as [n] in town-ship. We used Praat synthesis with different acoustic settings to create variants, e.g., [n]a, [n]b, [n]c, which were spliced into a base to produce three tokens, dow[n]a ed, dow[n]b ed, dow[n]c ed. Identical variants were used across conditions (e.g., in condition 2: mou[n]a d, mou[n]b d , mou[n]c d). On each trial, participants heard two tokens of the same word (e.g., dow[n]a ed – dow[n]b ed) and rated the difference between the target sound using a sliding scale with endpoints “0% (totally identical)” and “99% (totally different)”. Analysis with linear mixed-effects model revealed significant differences between ratings among all conditions, with the pattern township < downed < mound. These results suggest that a sound’s phonological and morphological roles within a word affect how people perceive it. We evaluate this finding in light of the differing predictions made by phoneme-based theories, which incorporate phonemes as a fundamental unit, versus exemplar theories, which argue that phonological units are emergent.

Keywords: exemplar theory; phoneme-based theory; speech perception; speech sound variation
Corresponding author: Anne Pycha, Department of Linguistics, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, WI, USA, E-mail:

Funding source: University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

Acknowledgments

I thank associate editor Georgia Zellou, as well as an anonymous reviewer, for helpful comments that greatly improved the paper. I also thank audiences at Northwestern University, the meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (2020), and the conference of the Association for Laboratory Phonology (2020).

Appendix

Stimulus words used in the experiment.

Target Morphology + Phonology Contrast-only Morphology
[l] boiled weld pollster
sailed wield malware
crawled scold frailty
healed guild coolness
smiled yield ailment
ruled mold railway
nailed mild gentleness
muffled shield normalcy
doubled fold concealment
detailed bald rivalry
stumbled wild annulment
crippled field novelty
strangled gold battleship
revealed cuckold cruelty
traveled scaffold royalty
troubled behold specialty
scrambled ahold settlement
canceled emerald jewelry
[n] toned fend kinship
zoned bland township
churned mound mournful
yearned gland spoonful
coined strand stainless
pawned astound inward
dined stipend spineless
shined rescind brainless
downed amend downward
leaned ascend onward
loaned almond sinful
rained commend painless
warned descend manhood
joined dividend runway
burned vagabond painful
signed correspond womanhood
learned apprehend weaponry
ironed comprehend certainty
[ɹ] bared curd boredom
floored fjord fearful
paired shard wireless
aired lard starship
toured turd fearless
lured nerd cheerful
squared herd careless
stared ward careful
poured toward awareness
dared yard ownership
scored concord tenderness
matured discord membership
obscured discard powerless
impaired accord leadership
explored absurd scholarship
endured award powerful
adored aboard neighborhood
secured leotard wonderful

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Received: 2020-05-26
Accepted: 2020-10-08
Published Online: 2021-02-08

© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2020-0025
Keywords for this article
exemplar theory; phoneme-based theory; speech perception; speech sound variation

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Editorial Note
  2. Editorial note
  3. Phonetics & Phonology
  4. Fast Track: fast (nearly) automatic formant-tracking using Praat
  5. Acoustic investigation of anticipatory vowel nasalization in a Caribbean and a non-Caribbean dialect of Spanish
  6. Evidence against a link between learning phonotactics and learning phonological alternations
  7. The extent and degree of utterance-final word lengthening in spontaneous speech from 10 languages
  8. Morphology & Syntax
  9. Brand names as multimodal constructions
  10. NP-internal structure and the distribution of adjectives in Mə̀dʉ́mbὰ
  11. A quantitative investigation of the ellipsis of English relativizers
  12. Positional dependency in Murrinhpatha: expanding the typology of non-canonical morphotactics
  13. Semantics & Pragmatics
  14. Multifactorial Information Management (MIM): summing up the emerging alternative to Information Structure
  15. Language Documentation & Typology
  16. Current trends in grammar writing
  17. Psycholinguistics & Neurolinguistics
  18. Experimental filler design influences error correction rates in a word restoration paradigm
  19. Phonological and morphological roles modulate the perception of consonant variants
  20. Language Acquisition and Language Learning
  21. Sounds like a dynamic system: a unifying approach to Language
  22. Sociolinguistics and Anthropological Linguistics
  23. Using hidden Markov models to find discrete targets in continuous sociophonetic data
  24. “It’s a Whole Vibe”: testing evaluations of grammatical and ungrammatical AAE on Twitter
  25. The sociolinguistics of /l/ in Manchester
  26. Computational & Corpus Linguistics
  27. An empirical study on the contribution of formal and semantic features to the grammatical gender of nouns
  28. A computational construction grammar approach to semantic frame extraction
  29. The “negative end” of change in grammar: terminology, concepts and causes
  30. In order that – a data-driven study of symptoms and causes of obsolescence
  31. Cognitive Linguistics
  32. Iconicity ratings really do measure iconicity, and they open a new window onto the nature of language
  33. Iconicity ratings really do measure iconicity, and they open a new window onto the nature of language
  34. Repetition in Mandarin-speaking children’s dialogs: its distribution and structural dimensions
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