Gestural reduction, lexical frequency, and sound change: A study of post-vocalic /l/

Abstract

Abstract: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.

The relationship between prosodic weakening and sound change: evidence from the German tense/lax vowel contrast

“…The listener is of course likely to have a role in this divergence, but the mismatch between categories and coarticulation should be in evidence in both speech production (as in Figure 5 of the present study) and in speech perception ( Figure 10); thus, what is being proposed here is that under hypoarticulation there can be a change in the relationship between categorisation and coarticulation in both modalities. This proposed model is also consistent with earlier (Phillips 1984;Pierrehumbert 2001, Pierrehumbert 2003Bybee 2002) and more recent findings (Lin et al 2014) that sound change may be more likely in words of high frequency because such words, being prone to reduction (Wright 2004), should make the association of coarticulation with the source that gives rise to it more opaque.…”

Normalized gestural overlap measures and spatial properties of lingual movements in Korean non-assimilating contexts*

“…As Cho (2001) applied Levene's tests for homogeneity of variance to assessing intergestural stability between gestures, less variability was also observed in lexical compounds (e.g., /pek+pal/ 'white hair') and within a single morpheme (/pani/ 'name') as compared to the non-lexicalized compounds (e.g., /pek+pal/ 'white foot') and across a morpheme boundary (e.g., /pan+i/ 'class + NOM.'). Despite that Cho's (2001) stimuli might not be balanced in terms of the frequency of occurrence (cf., Lin et al, 2014), his data has supported tighter intergestural coordination for lexical entries before morphological processes. Based upon data we have acquired in the current study, we learn that a tighter intergestural coordinative structure for physiologically entrenched tongue articulators (e.g., the tongue dorsum and the tongue tip) can be established even for clusters with morphosyntactic boundaries since they allow smaller degrees of freedom.…”

Pushes and pulls from below: Anatomical variation, articulation and sound change

“…Speculations that he notes include the variable presence of the risorius muscles leading to differential degrees of the spread lip configuration; variable tongue length possibly being related to aspects of Japanese phonology (the Japanese possessing relatively shorter tongues), although the exact details are not specified; and varying presence of certain epilaryngeal muscles (thyroepiglottic inferior and thyromembranosus muscles) possibly relating to increased tendency towards constricted voice qualities in German and Danish (compared against Japanese), and other phenomena (such as Danish stød). However, despite the potential importance of anatomical variation for understanding some phonetic variants, and despite the attention that individual phonetic variation has received in numerous studies, anatomical variables are rarely ever measured and analyzed, let alone discussed (some recent examples include Dalcher 2008;Beddor 2009;Lin et al 2014). This neglect to include anatomical variation in studies of sound change, may be partly due to the stigma associated with such research, which is even condemned in some influential textbooks as irrevocably racist and obviously false (Campbell 1998: 284).…”