Volume 5, Issue 1 - Special Issue: The relationship between the origin and spread of sound change

The magnitude of anterior and dorsal constrictions for laterals in /(C)(C)VlC/ words produced by eight American English speakers was measured using ultrasound imaging. The results replicate previous findings that laterals have weaker anterior constrictions when followed by labial or velar consonants than when followed by alveolar consonants. The main novel finding is that, in words with /VlC labial / or /VlC velar / sequences, this anterior constriction was weaker in high-frequency words ( help , milk ) than in low-frequency words ( whelp , ilk ). Although high-frequency words also showed slight reduction of the dorsal constriction, dorsal reduction was stable, small in magnitude, and not correlated with anterior reduction, consistent with alveolar reduction not being simply a consequence of overall weaker lingual constrictions in more frequent words. Acoustic measures for laterals showed that the degree of anterior constriction correlated with the frequency separation between F1 and F2: more reduced alveolar constrictions – especially likely in high-frequency words – were linked with greater formant proximity. These articulatory and acoustic patterns are interpreted as potentially contributing to the initiation and lexical diffusion of historical /l/ lenition. It is proposed that gestural reduction in high-frequency words in which the anterior gesture for laterals must be coordinated with another supralaryngeal constriction serves as a precipitating factor in /l/ vocalization and possibly (although to a lesser extent) /l/ loss.

This study examines how variation in production is perceived and then (re)interpreted by listeners, thus providing the link between phonetic variation and sound change. We investigate whether listeners can detect the nasal leak that may accompany utterance-initial voiced stops in Spanish, and reinterpret it as a nasal segment. Such reinterpretation may account for a number of sound patterns involving emergent nasals adjacent to voiced stops in oral contexts. Oral pressure, nasal/oral airflow, and audio were recorded for utterance-initial /b d p t/ produced by 10 Spanish speakers. Tokens showing different degrees of nasal leak (nasal C, maximum, medium, and no nasal leak) were placed intervocalically, where both /C/ and /NC/ may occur. The stimuli were presented to Spanish listeners for identification as /VNCV/ or /V(C)CV/. Identification results indicate a higher number of VNCV responses with incremental changes in nasal leak in voiced but not voiceless stimuli. Reaction time analysis showed shorter latencies to nasal identification for larger velum leak stimuli. The results suggest that listeners can `hear' the nasal leak and fail to relate it to voicing initiation, interpreting a nasal segment. Thus a gesture aimed at facilitating voicing initiation may be interpreted as a new target goal.

Speech perception is highly robust to variation, but familiarity with a particular source of variation can nevertheless lead to significant processing benefits. In the domain of cross-dialect speech perception, familiar local and standard varieties have been shown to facilitate lexical and semantic processing relative to unfamiliar dialects. However, more recent research suggests that individuals with exposure to both a local non-standard variety and a regional or national standard variety exhibit a mix of lexical processing costs and benefits, suggesting that familiarity with multiple different linguistic systems can result in both independent processing benefits for each variety as well as competition among variable multi-dialect representations. In an exemplar model of language processing, this complex pattern of results suggests several loci for sound change within an individual language user. Although the processing benefits associated with the local variety may contribute to long-term maintenance of variation through divergence from a regional or national standard, the processing benefits associated with the standard may contribute to dialect leveling and convergence towards the standard. Competition between these forces for maintenance and leveling will be observed most strongly in individuals with extensive exposure to both a non-standard local variety and a regional or national standard.

The differential categorization of identical stimuli depending on the presence of a prime is described as a perceptual divergence effect. We examined whether native listeners of the Berlin vernacular of German categorized identical acoustic stimuli differently in the explicit context of the names of two different districts of Berlin, assuming that listeners infer social information and linguistic stereotypes based on the names of these neighborhoods (Kreuzberg vs. Zehlendorf). All listeners categorized natural acoustic stimuli with synthetic fricatives synthesized along a continuum ranging from /ç/ to /ʃ/ as either Fichte /fɪçtə/ (`spruce') or fischte /fɪʃtə/ (1st person sg. `to fish'). This variable was chosen because many young multiethnic speakers of Berlin German pronounce /ç/ as [ʃ] or [ɕ], and this alternation is highly associated with speakers with a migrant background from Kreuzberg. Data were gathered in a forced-choice identification task, and, for a subset of the participants, reaction times (RTs) were also gathered. Results indicate a differential categorization pattern depending on (1) the copresented information, i.e., Kreuzberg, Zehlendorf, or none (control), and (2) the age of the listeners, with older listeners being more affected by the co-presented information. While older listeners categorized significantly more /ʃ/ sounds in the context of Kreuzberg than in the control or Zehlendorf condition, younger listeners rated most /ʃ/ sounds in the control condition (no added information). Results are interpreted in terms of a potential sound change in progress: the loss of the phoneme contrast between /ç/ and /ʃ/.

Phonetic imitation is the unintentional, spontaneous acquisition of speech characteristics of another talker. Previous work has shown that imitation is strongly moderated by social preference in adults, and that social preference affects children's speech acquisition within peer groups. Such findings have led to the suggestion that phonetic imitation is related to larger processes of sound change in a change-by-accommodation model. This study examines how preferential processing of particular voice types affects spontaneous phonetic accommodation, interpreting the results in the context of how sound change can be propagated through a speech community. To explore this question eight model talkers previously rated as attractive, unattractive, typical, and atypical for each gender were used in an auditory naming paradigm. Twenty participants completed the task, and an AXB measure was used to quantify imitation. Female participants imitated more than male participants, but this varied across model voices. Females were found to rely more on social preference than men, while both groups imitated the atypical voices. The results suggest that females adapt their speech to auditory input more readily, but the nature of the accommodation does not qualify as direct evidence for a change-by-accommodation model given the constrained context of the task.

This paper examines whether data from a large cross-linguistic corpus of adult and child productions can be used to support an assumed corollary of the Neogrammarian distinction between two types of phonological change. The first type is regular sound change, which is assumed to be incremental and so should show continuity between phonological development and the age-related variation observed in the speech community undergoing the change. The second type is dialect borrowing, which could show an abrupt discontinuity between developmental patterns before and after the socio-historical circumstances that instigate it. We examine the acquisition of two contrasts: the Seoul Korean contrast between lax and aspirated stops which is undergoing regular sound change, and the standard Mandarin contrast between retroflex and dental sibilants which has been borrowed recently into the Sōngyuán dialect. Acquisition of the different contrasts patterns as predicted from the assumed differences between continuous regular sound change and potentially abrupt dialect borrowing. However, there are substantial gaps in our understanding both of the extent of cross-cultural variability in language socialization and of how this might affect the mechanisms of phonological change that must be addressed before we can fully understand the relationship between the time courses of the two.

In the colloquial Phnom Penh dialect of Khmer (Cambodian), lexical use of F 0 is emerging together with an intermediate VOT category and breathy phonation following the loss of /r/ in onsets (e.g., `teacher' > []). I show how this incipient tonogenesis might arise in a series of computational simulations tracing the evolution of multivariate phonetic category distributions in a population of ideal observers. Acoustic production data from a fieldwork study conducted in Phnom Penh was used as the starting point for the simulations. After establishing that the basic framework predicted relative stability over time, two possible responses to a phonetic production bias were considered: one in which agents correctly identified the source of (and thereby compensated for) the effects of the bias, and one in which agents misattributed the acoustic effects of the bias as a property of the onset. Good qualitative fits to the empirical production data were found for the latter group of learners, while the outcome for compensating learners resembled production data from a related dialect. These results are consistent with the sudden and discontinuous nature of many sound changes, and suggest that what appear to be enhancement effects may also emerge under different assumptions about the number of cue dimensions accessible to or deemed relevant by the learner.