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Sound change and its relationship to variation in production and categorization in perception| old_uid | 11774 |
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| title | Sound change and its relationship to variation in production and categorization in perception |
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| start_date | 2012/10/29 |
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| schedule | 10h |
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| online | no |
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| location_info | A |
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| summary | In some models (Lindblom et al, 1995; Bybee, 2002), sound change is associated with the
type of synchronic reduction that occurs in prosodically weak and semantically predictable
contexts. In other models (Ohala, 1993), sound change can be brought about through
listeners’ misperception of coarticulation in speech production. The talk will draw upon both
models in order to explore whether coarticulatory misperception is more likely in
prosodically weak contexts. In order to do so, the magnitude of trans-consonantal vowel
coarticulation was investigated in /pV1pV2l/ non-words with the pitch-accent falling either on
the first or second syllable and in which V1 = /?, ?/ and V2 = /e, o/. The analysis of these
words produced by 20 L1-German speakers showed that prosodic weakening caused vowel
undershoot in /?/ but had little effect on V2-on-V1 coarticulation. In a perception experiment,
a V1 = /?-?/ continuum was synthesised and the same speakers made forced choice
judgements to the same non-words with the prosody manipulated such that stress was
perceived on V1 or on V2. Listeners compensated for V2-on-V1 coarticulation; however, the
magnitude of compensation was less in the prosodically weak than in the strong context. The
general conclusion is that segmental context influences both the dynamics of speech
production and perceptual categorization, but not always in the same way: it is this
divergence between the two which may be especially likely in prosodically weak contexts
and which may, in turn, facilitate sound change.
References :
Bybee, J. (2002). Word frequency and context of use in the lexical diffusion of phonetically conditioned sound change. Language Variation Change, 14, 261–290.
Lindblom, B., Guion, S., Hura, S., Moon, S. J., and Willerman, R. (1995). Is sound change adaptive? Rivista di Linguistica, 7, 5–36.
Ohala, J. J. (1993). Sound change as nature’s speech perception experiment. Speech Communication, 13, 155–161. |
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| responsibles | Bel, Welby |
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