An acoustic and electropalatographic study of lexical and postlexical palatalization in American English

Zsiga, Elizabeth C.

doi:10.1017/cbo9780511554315.020

Cited by 91 publications

(85 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…Obviously, /t/-deletion is not a phonological rule-governed process, but is more likely to arise from a weakening of the /t/-gesture or from gestural overlap with adjacent segments (Browman & Goldstein, 1990. Evidence that assimilation (Holst & Nolan, 1995;Zsiga, 1994Zsiga, , 1995 and schwa-deletion (Manuel, 1992) are gradient has been reported previously and so is not unexpected for /t/-deletion.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 52%

“…Previous work indicated that sandhi-processes may not only be variable in the sense of being optional but also gradient in the sense that they are not complete (e.g., Gow, 2003;Holst & Nolan, 1995;Nolan, 1992;Zsiga, 1995). Browman and Goldstein (1990, pages 360-365) discussed X-ray data tracking the positions of small lead pellets placed on the lips and the tongue of participants producing the sentence ''perfect memory''.…”

Section: Qualitative Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

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Listeners recover /t/s that speakers reduce: Evidence from /t/-lenition in Dutch

Mitterer

Ernestus

2006

Journal of Phonetics

147

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In everyday speech, words may be reduced. Little is known about the consequences of such reductions for spoken word comprehension. This study investigated /t/-lenition in Dutch in two corpus studies and three perceptual experiments. The production studies revealed that /t/-lenition is most likely to occur after [s] and before bilabial consonants. The perception experiments showed that listeners take into account both phonological context, phonetic detail, and the lexical status of the form in the interpretation of codas that may or may not contain a lenited word-final /t/. These results speak against models of word recognition that make hard decisions on a prelexical level. r

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 52%

Section: Qualitative Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Listeners recover /t/s that speakers reduce: Evidence from /t/-lenition in Dutch

Mitterer

Ernestus

2006

Journal of Phonetics

147

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“…extort). While the former do not involve a complete change in place of articulation (Zsiga, 1995), and the latter are of doubtful productivity, the existence of such patterns may have made alveolar palatalization easier to learn for our subjects. It would be interesting to investigate whether alveolar palatalization is also easier to learn in a miniature artificial language for speakers whose native languages lack alveolar palatalization altogether.…”

Section: Limitations and Future Directionsmentioning

confidence: 91%

What happens to large changes? Saltation produces well-liked outputs that are hard to generate

Smolek

Kapatsinski

2018

Laboratory Phonology: Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology

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Smolek, A. and Kapatsinski, V. 2018 What happens to large changes? Saltation produces well-liked outputs that are hard to generate. Laboratory Phonology: Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology 9(1): 10, pp. 1-27, DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/labphon.93 lab l a phon . Recent research has argued that saltation is diachronically unstable and documented one possible cause of instability: Learners exposed to saltatory alternations may overgeneralize them to intermediate sounds. However, this research has trained participants to criterion or excluded participants who did not reach criterion accuracy on familiar sounds. In first language acquisition, learners of languages with saltatory patterns cannot hope to receive more exposure to the pattern than those learning non-saltatory patterns. For this reason, we examined learning of saltatory and non-saltatory patterns after a constant amount of training. We compared saltatory labial palatalization to non-saltatory alveolar and velar palatalization. Participants showed overgeneralization of saltatory palatalization in a judgment task. However, saltatory alternations did not result in increased rates of palatalizing similar sounds, compared to non-saltatory alternations. Instead, saltatory alternations were less likely to be produced than non-saltatory alternations. These results suggest that large, saltatory alternations may be diachronically unstable because they are harder to (learn to) produce. Instead of being overgeneralized to intermediate sounds, saltatory alternations may disappear from the language by losing productivity and being replaced with faithful mappings.

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“…This study showed, among other things, that voiceless stops such as /p/ in the word support /s=pLrt/ maintain their characteristic aspiration when following [s] in cases of schwa elision, in contrast with underlying /sp/ clusters, which notably lack aspiration after the [p] release. Other connected speech phenomena now claimed to be gradient rather than categorical include nasal place assimilation in English (Byrd, 1996;Nolan, 1992, but see Ellis & Hardcastle, 2002 for evidence of categorical assimilation in some speakers), palatalization of /s/ before /j/ in English (Zsiga, 1995), and progressive voice assimilation in German (Kuzla, Cho, & Ernestus, 2007).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Vowel elision in casual French: The case of vowel /e/ in the word c’était

Torreira¹,

Ernestus²

2011

Journal of Phonetics

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a b s t r a c tThis study investigates the reduction of vowel /e/ in the French word c'était /sete/ 'it was'. This reduction phenomenon appeared to be highly frequent, as more than half of the occurrences of this word in a corpus of casual French contained few or no acoustic traces of a vowel between [s] and [t]. All our durational analyses clearly supported a categorical absence of vowel /e/ in a subset of c'était tokens. This interpretation was also supported by our finding that the occurrence of complete elision and [e] duration in non-elision tokens were conditioned by different factors. However, spectral measures were consistent with the possibility that a highly reduced /e/ vowel is still present in elision tokens in spite of the durational evidence for categorical elision. We discuss how these findings can be reconciled, and conclude that acoustic analysis of uncontrolled materials can provide valuable information about the mechanisms underlying reduction phenomena in casual speech.

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An acoustic and electropalatographic study of lexical and postlexical palatalization in American English

Cited by 91 publications

References 19 publications

Listeners recover /t/s that speakers reduce: Evidence from /t/-lenition in Dutch

Listeners recover /t/s that speakers reduce: Evidence from /t/-lenition in Dutch

What happens to large changes? Saltation produces well-liked outputs that are hard to generate

Vowel elision in casual French: The case of vowel /e/ in the word c’était

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