Individual-level contact limits phonological complexity: Evidence from bunched and retroflex /ɹ/

Abstract

We compare the complexity of idiosyncratic sound patterns involving American English /ɹ/ with the relative simplicity of clear/dark /l/-allophony patterns found in English and other languages. For /ɹ/, we report an ultrasound-based articulatory study of twenty-seven speakers of American English. Two speakers use only retroflex /ɹ/, sixteen use only bunched /ɹ/, and nine use both /ɹ/ types, with idiosyncratic allophonic distributions. These allophony patterns are covert, because the difference between bunched and retroflex /ɹ/ is not readily perceived by listeners. We compare this typology of /ɹ/-allophony patterns to clear/dark /l/-allophony patterns in seventeen languages. On the basis of the observed patterns, we show that individual-level /ɹ/ allophony and language-level /l/ allophony exhibit similar phonetic grounding, but that /ɹ/-allophony patterns are considerably more complex. The low complexity of language-level /l/-allophony patterns, which are more readily perceived by listeners, is argued to be the result of individual-level contact in the development of sound patterns. More generally, we argue that familiar phonological patterns (which are relatively simple and homogeneous within communities) may arise from individuallevel articulatory patterns, which may be complex and speaker-specific, by a process of koineization. We conclude that two classic properties of phonological rules, phonetic naturalness and simplicity, arise from different sources.*

North American /l/ both darkens and lightens depending on morphological constituency and segmental context

“…There is a rich descriptive literature on /l/-allophony, both in English (Wells, 1982;Olive, Greenwood, & Coleman, 1993;Hughes, Trudgill, & Watt, 2005) and crosslinguistically (see summary in Mielke, Baker, & Archangeli, 2016). Work on /l/ also includes a significant number of acoustic and imaging studies on the realization of /l/ in English (e.g., Lehiste, 1964;Sproat & Fujimura, 1993;Gick, 2003;Scobbie & Pouplier, 2010;Proctor & Walker, 2012) and various languages (e.g., Recasens & Espinosa, 2005;Recasens, 2012).…”

On the nature of the perception-production link: Individual variability in English sibilant-vowel coarticulation

“…Finally, as noted earlier, an increasing number of studies has argued for the importance of understanding individual variation in perception and production as a means to understand sound change actuation (Baker et al, 2011;Beddor, 2009;Dimov, Katseff, & Johnson, 2012;Garrett & Johnson, 2013;Mielke, Baker, & Archangeli, 2016;Stevens & Harrington, 2014;Yu, 2010Yu, , 2013Yu, , 2016Zellou, 2017). As coarticulation-induced variation in speech is often assumed to be a major source of phonetic precursors to sound change and sound patterns (Ohala, 1993a(Ohala, , 1993b, our findings suggest that some individuals within the same speech community are more advanced in reifying contextspecific variation in speech production than others and this progression is mirrored in the individuals' perceptual behavior as well.…”

Perturbing the community grammar: Individual differences and community-level constraints on sociolinguistic variation

“…/ɹ/ can be produced with either a bunched-tongue articulation or a retracted-tongue articulation, with no apparent audible difference between the two (Delattre & Freeman 1968). Mielke et al (2016) demonstrate that, without any cues with respect to how this sound is to be articulated, the population of speakers surveyed in their study breaks down into roughly half who use retroflex /ɹ/ in at least some contexts, and roughly half who use bunched /ɹ/ exclusively. Covert articulatory differences cannot spread through a speech community (precisely because they are covert), but they can have acoustic consequences which themselves can trigger change (Smith et al This volume).…”

“…In order to explain why /s/-retraction, which is rooted in a universal process of coarticulation between /s/ and /ɹ/, has not happened everywhere, the authors appeal to individual differences in the articulation of English /ɹ/. As Mielke et al (2016) detail, and as I discuss further in Section 4, /ɹ/ can be produced with different tongue configurations that produce no audible cues to articulation. Speakers with one articulation of /ɹ/ which engenders less coarticulation with their /s/ may encounter speakers with another articulation of /ɹ/ which engenders more coarticulation with their /s/.…”