Pre-aspiration, quantity, and sound change

Abstract

Geminate voiceless stops /pː tː kː/ have been recently found to show optional pre-aspiration under certain circumstances in spontaneous and read Italian speech. This paper investigates the impact of pre-aspiration on the perception and production of contrastive quantity, e.g., fato 'fate' vs. fatto 'done'. It tests the hypothesis that synchronic variability involving pre-aspiration, together with concomitant stop closure shortening, may be setting in motion a sound change in Italian ultimately leading to de-gemination, i.e., /pː tː kː/ > [ h p h t h k] > /p t k/. The proposed sound change would be perceptually driven (Ohala 1981(Ohala , 1993) and comes about via listener association of pre-aspiration with the preceding vowel rather than the oral closure. The hypothesis is only partially supported by the experimental results. Perception data show that Italians perceive pre-aspirated stops as shorter than plain stops of analogous overall duration. However, production data show that pre-aspiration in Italian does not in fact involve concomitant oral closure shortening.

Proposal for superscript diacritics for prenasalization, preglottalization and preaspiration

“…On the other hand, in favor of /hC/ sequence analyses is the fact that preaspirates often pattern like (indeed, often derive from) geminates or CC sequences. (For a recent example, see Stevens & Reubold 2014. ) Their distribution, favoring medial and final positions, is typical of geminates.…”

Cognitive basis of individual differences in speech perception, production and representations: The role of domain general attentional switching

“…Previous studies have identified several aspects of systematic heterogeneity among individuals, e.g., speech perception (Beddor, 2009), speech production (Baker, Archangeli, & Mielke, 2011), the mapping between perception and production (Stevens & Reubold, 2014) and cognitive processing style (Yu, 2010), which have elucidated how sound change occurs and progresses within a particular community. For instance, Beddor (2009) has proposed that sound change can arise from idiosyncratic perception grammar; specifically, individual variation in perceptual analysis of coarticulatory variation would result in variation in phonological representations.…”

Planting the seed for sound change: Evidence from real-time MRI of velum kinematics in German

“…The starting point for Beddor's model is the well-known finding that there are multiple cues to speech-sound contrasts (Francis et al 2000, Harmon et al 2019, Holt & Lotto 2006, Lisker 1986) and that listeners vary in the attention or weight that they assign to these cues for disambiguating speech sounds (Beddor 2012, Chandrasekaran et al 2010, Clayards 2018, Kim & Clayards 2019, Schertz et al 2015. Compatibly with these findings, Beddor (2012Beddor ( , 2015 has shown that there are variable perceptual strategies for identifying nasalization in ṼN sequences (where Ṽ signifies a vowel with some coarticulatory nasalization): some listeners base their judgments mostly on information in N, others associate nasalization with ṼN (without parsing such judgments with either just Ṽ or just N), while yet others' perceptions of nasalization are swayed to a greater extent by information in Ṽ alone (see Stevens & Reubold 2014 for a similar argument for preaspiration).…”