Phonetic bias in sound change

Garrett, Andrew; Johnson, Keith

doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199573745.003.0003

Cited by 169 publications

(62 citation statements)

References 26 publications

(29 reference statements)

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“…A vast amount has been written about the effects that are at work in this process (see Ohala 1993, Hale 2007, and Garrett & Johnson 2013, among other surveys), and it is not necessary to review that literature here in detail. Let us assume a theory that relates potential reanalyses in the course of grammar construction to moderately well understood consequences of the way speech production and perception operate.…”

Section: Explanatory Bases For Sound Patternsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Synchronic Versus Diachronic Explanation and the Nature of the Language Faculty

Anderson

2016

Annu. Rev. Linguist.

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The nineteenth-century conception that linguistic structure was to be explained by recourse to the histories of languages was largely abandoned with the rise of synchronic theories in the twentieth century, but has recently returned to prominence. Whereas traditional generative theories of language have tended to attribute crosslinguistic regularities to constraints imposed on the class of possible grammars by the human Language Faculty, some scholars have argued that this is often a mistake: that there are no (or at least very few) real substantive universals of language, and that the regularities in question arise from common paths of diachronic change having their basis in factors outside of the defining properties of the set of cognitively accessible grammars. This review surveys evidence for that position, primarily in phonology but also in morphology and syntax. I argue that in phonology, there are at present no convincingly demonstrated substantive universals governing the set of possible regularities, and that the generalizations we find should be attributed to a combination of contingent historical developments and biases in the learning algorithm that relates available data to the grammars learners acquire. In morphology and syntax, I argue that some apparent generalizations are indeed the product of diachronic change rather than synchronic constraint. 5.1

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Section: Explanatory Bases For Sound Patternsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Synchronic Versus Diachronic Explanation and the Nature of the Language Faculty

Anderson

2016

Annu. Rev. Linguist.

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“…Evidently, this is a matter deserving further investigation. An equally important question, on which there is little research, is whether similarity is asymmetric (Chang, Plauche, and Ohala 2001;Garrett and Johnson 2013;McGuire and Babel 2012).…”

Section: The Dimensions and Units Of Phonological Similaritymentioning

confidence: 99%

Similarity in the generalization of implicitly learned sound patterns

Cristià

Mielke

Daland

et al. 2013

Laboratory Phonology

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It is likely that generalization of implicitly learned sound patterns to novel words and sounds is structured by a similarity metric, but how may this metric best be captured? We report on an experiment where participants were exposed to an artificial phonology, and frequency ratings were used to probe implicit abstraction of onset statistics. Non-words bearing an onset that was presented during initial exposure were subsequently rated most frequent, indicating that participants generalized onset statistics to new non-words. Participants also rated non-words with untrained onsets as somewhat frequent, indicating generalization to onsets that had not been used during the exposure phase. While generalization could be accounted for in terms of featural distance, it was insensitive to natural class structure. Generalization to untrained sounds was predicted better by models requiring prior linguistic knowledge (either traditional distinctive features or articulatory phonetic information) than by a model based on a linguistically naïve measure of acoustic similarity.

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“…The time is ripe for revisiting these assumptions in light of recent work that suggests that individuals may differ in the magnitude of PCCA and other context-dependent speech processing effects. 5,[11][12][13][14] Individual variability in perception and production has been argued to be important for the understanding of the actuation of sound change, 12,[14][15][16] particularly if the variation in perceptual and production norms across individuals within a population is systematic. Yet, little is known regarding whether the individual differences are stable regardless of task types.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The stability of perceptual compensation for coarticulation within and across individuals: A cross-validation study

Lee

2014

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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Perceptual compensation for coarticulation (PCCA) refers to listener responses consistent with perceptual reduction of the acoustic effects of the coarticulatory context on a target sound. The robustness of PCCA across individuals and across tasks have not been studied together previously. This study reports the results of two experiments designed to determine the robustness of perceptual compensation for vocalic influence on sibilant perception across tasks and the stability of such compensatory response within an individual. Identification and discrimination data, collected in the laboratory and on Amazon's Mechanical Turk, showed that individuals are moderately stable in their PCCA responses across tasks and the level of stability is consistent across both the lab-based and the internet-based cohorts, although some differences are observed.

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Phonetic bias in sound change

Cited by 169 publications

References 26 publications

Synchronic Versus Diachronic Explanation and the Nature of the Language Faculty

Synchronic Versus Diachronic Explanation and the Nature of the Language Faculty

Similarity in the generalization of implicitly learned sound patterns

The stability of perceptual compensation for coarticulation within and across individuals: A cross-validation study

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