Phonological mergers have systemic phonetic consequences:<scp>palm</scp>, trees, and the Low Back Merger Shift

Gardner, Matt Hunt; Roeder, Rebecca

doi:10.1017/s0954394522000059

Cited by 5 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 68 publications

(101 reference statements)

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“…The CH approach recognizes that the differential substitutions fall out from inventory effects, not local surface comparisons, and further shows that the machinery of CH that has been productively used to account for L1A (Bohn and Santos, 2018), historical change (Oxford, 2015), sociolinguistics (Natvig and Salmons, 2021;Hunt Gardner and Roeder, 2022), and L3A (Archibald, 2022a,b) can also be used productively for an explanatory account of one of the oldest questions in L2 phonology: differential substitution.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Differential substitution: a contrastive hierarchy account

Archibald

2023

Front. Lang. Sci.

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In this article, I tackle the question of differential substitution in L2 phonology. A classic example of the phenomenon is learners from different L1s attempting to acquire the L2 English interdental fricative /θ/. Speakers of some languages (e.g., Japanese) tend to pronounce the /θ/ as [s] while speakers of other languages (e.g., Russian) tend to pronounce the /θ/ as [t]). Since both Japanese and Russian have both /s/ and /t/ in their phonemic inventories, it is interesting to ask why one language would choose [s] and the other [t]. What I argue in this article is that it is not a local comparison of two sounds, two features, or two phonemes that will determine why one segment rather than another is substituted. Rather, I argue that we must consider the formal representation of the entire segmental inventory (represented as a contrastive hierarchy) in order to understand why the Japanese pick the [s] but the Russian the [t] as the “best” substitute for the English /θ/. What I will demonstrate is that in the languages that substitute [s], [continuant] is the highest-ranked feature that has scope over the place and voice features in the contrastive hierarchy of phonological features. In the languages that substitute [t], the place and voice features rank above [continuant].

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Differential substitution: a contrastive hierarchy account

Archibald

2023

Front. Lang. Sci.

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“…The LBMS (Figure 1, right panel) is an ongoing panregional vowel shift identified across multiple areas of the United States and Canada (Becker, 2019; Boberg, 2019; Eckert, 2008). The proposed genesis of the shift is the merging of the low back vowels lot and thought (Becker, 2019; though see Gardner & Roeder [2022] for an alternative proposal), which is either in process or has reached completion for many English speakers across North America (Labov et al, 2006). After the low-back merger, the lax vowels lower along the front diagonal of the vowel space, in sequence: first trap , then dress , and kit .…”

Section: Relevant Vowel Shiftsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Boomer Peak or Gen X Cliff? From SVS to LBMS in Georgia English

et al. 2023

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The late twentieth century in the United States marks the decline of regional vowel systems like the Northern Cities Shift and the Southern Vowel Shift, replaced by supralocal systems like the Low-Back-Merger Shift. We chart such change in acoustic data from seven generations of White speakers (n = 135) in the Southeastern state of Georgia. We analyze front vowels affected by both the SVS and LBMS (dress, trap), plus price and face, known respectively to monophthongize and centralize in the SVS, and LBMS-implicated lot/thought. The SVS is most advanced among Georgians born in the mid-twentieth century, particularly in face-centralization. In Generation X, retraction of front lax vowels begins, leading toward the LBMS. These results, which hold across genders and education levels, support findings that regional vowel systems declined precipitously following a Gen X “cliff,” raising questions about how such language changes are rooted in demographic transformations of that time period.

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Using a contrastive hierarchy to formalize structural similarity as I-proximity in L3 phonology

Archibald

2023

LAB

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In this paper I argue that cross-linguistic similarity in third language acquisition is determined by a structural hierarchy of contrastive phonological features. Such an approach allows us formalize a predictive notion of I-proximity which also provides an explanatory model of L2, and L3 phonological knowledge (represented in an integrated I-grammar). The metrics of phonological similarity (i.e., structural not acoustic) are analogous to morphosyntactic similarity in that both morphosyntactic and phonological approaches can compare the outcomes of parsing the L3 input by the L1 hierarchy and by the L2 hierarchy. From this starting point I propose a conservative, incremental learning theory to guide subsequent reconstruction of the L3 grammar. Under this model, it can be argued that phonology is part of Faculty of Language Narrow (FLN). The (gradient) phonetic material comes from outside the FLN but the linguistic computational system converts it to discrete abstract elements that can be manipulated by the learner.

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Phonological mergers have systemic phonetic consequences:palm, trees, and the Low Back Merger Shift

Cited by 5 publications

References 68 publications

Differential substitution: a contrastive hierarchy account

Differential substitution: a contrastive hierarchy account

Boomer Peak or Gen X Cliff? From SVS to LBMS in Georgia English

Using a contrastive hierarchy to formalize structural similarity as I-proximity in L3 phonology

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