Auditory disruption improves word segmentation: A functional basis for lenition phenomena

Abstract

This paper presents evidence that spirantization, a cross-linguistically common lenition process, affects English listeners’ ease of segmenting novel “words” in an artificial language. The cross-linguistically common spirantization pattern of initial stops and medial continuants (e.g. [ɡuβa]) results in improved word segmentation compared to the inverse “anti-lenition” pattern of initial continuants and medial stops (e.g. [ɣuba]). The study also tests the effect of obstruent voicing, another common lenition pattern, but finds no significant differences in segmentation performance. There are several points of broader interest in these studies. Most of the phonetic factors influencing word segmentation in past studies have been language-specific and/or prosodic in nature: stress, intonation, final lengthening, etc. Spirantization, while often prosodically conditioned, is different from all of these patterns in that it concerns a segmental alternation. Moreover, the effects reported here are for speakers of a language, American English, that only sporadically displays spirantization, and not in the phonological contexts used in the experiment. This suggests that the results may reflect more general properties of speech perception and word boundary detection, rather than a perceptual processing strategy transferred directly from English. As such, the studies offer partial support for theories of lenition rooted in notions of perceptual-acoustic continuity and disruption.

The causal structure of lenition: A case for the causal precedence of durational shortening

“…The opposing fortition processes (strengthening) increase disruption in the presence of a prosodic boundary by reducing the intensity of the target segment. Katz & Fricke (2018) show that listeners expect reduced forms to occur in non-boundary positions in an artificial language experiment. We found no evidence that stress affects intensity directly, but that evidence does not directly oppose prosody-based accounts.…”

The phonetics and phonology of lenition: A Campidanese Sardinian case study

“…And if fortis forms occur initially in prosodic domains, they disrupt the speech stream more. By aligning auditory discontinuities with prosodic boundaries, even probabilistically, this should help listeners chunk the speech stream into constituents; Katz and Fricke (2018) provide some preliminary evidence from a word-segmentation experiment that this prediction is correct. Another version of the listener-oriented approach holds that it is information that is aligned with prosodic boundaries (Harris, 2003;Cohen Priva, 2017).…”

Metre, grouping, and event hierarchies in music: A tutorial for linguists

“…Musical event hierarchies encode constituency, which is associated with Gestalt grouping principles on one hand and with tonal and motivic interpretation on the other. Prosodic structure encodes constituency, which is associated with Gestalt‐relevant sound patterns (Jeon & Nolan, 2013; Katz & Fricke, 2018; Kentner & Féry, 2013) on the one hand and syntactic and information‐structural interpretation on the other (e.g. Selkirk, 1984; Steedman, 2000).…”