The effect of prosodic weakening on the production and perception of trans-consonantal vowel coarticulation in German

Abstract

The present study considers whether coarticulation in production and its relationship to categorization could provide a synchronic basis for the prevalence of sound change in unstressed syllables. The size of V2-on-V1 coarticulation in the production of /pV1pV2l/ non-words (V1 = /U,Y/ and V2 = /e, o/) produced by German speakers and with stress falling either on the first or second syllable was compared with forced-choice perceptual categorization of resynthesized versions of these non-words. In speech production, /Y/ but not /U/ was perturbed by anticipatory V2-on-V1 coarticulation. Stress had no influence on coarticulation but caused target undershoot in /U/. The same speakers compensated for coarticulation in perception: however, in the unstressed context the speakers compensated less and their diminished compensatory coarticulation was shown to be linked to /U/-undershoot. Taken together, these results point to a mismatch between coarticulation and categorization that is suggested as a possible source of sound change: whereas de-stressing did not affect V2-on-V1 coarticulation in production, it weakened V2's influence on perceptual /ʊ-Y/ categorization. The evidence that this mismatch is indirectly caused by stress-dependent reduction in /U/ that is unrelated to the V2-source of the coarticulation is also consistent with a model of sound change as non-teleological.

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

“…The present study extends that of Harrington et al (2013) to sentence stress and to the sound change that can arise from the well-established finding of vowel shortening in polysyllabic words, which has been extensively documented for Germanic languages (e.g., Lindblom and Rapp 1973 for Swedish;Lehiste 1970;Klatt 1973;Port 1981 for English;Nooteboom 1972 for Dutch). The focus here is on the changes to segmental timing in German trochaic (sackte/sagte; 'sagged'/'said') words in relation to their corresponding monosyllables (sackt, sagt; 'sags'/'says').…”

“…Although this proposed generalisation to hypoarticulation is not directly inferable from the results of the present study, hypoarticulation may be the common cause linking the findings of diminished perceptual compensation for coarticulation in deaccentuation (this paper) and in rhythmically weak syllables (Harrington et al 2013). Both these studies suggest that the conditions for sound change to take place are likely to be met when, first, category boundaries become more blurred, either through greater variation and/or because they are shifted closer together; and, secondly, when the magnitude of the coarticulatory effect that a source gives rise to is maintained or increased.…”

“…Both these studies suggest that the conditions for sound change to take place are likely to be met when, first, category boundaries become more blurred, either through greater variation and/or because they are shifted closer together; and, secondly, when the magnitude of the coarticulatory effect that a source gives rise to is maintained or increased. In Harrington et al (2013), this argument was applied to anticipatory V 1 CV 2 coarticulation in which the high vowels in V 1 position were found to shift closer together when V 1 was prosodically weak, but the coarticulatory influence of V 2 on V 1 was maintained.…”

“…The dependent variables were (1) V, the log of the vowel duration; (2) C, the log of the duration of the /kt/ cluster as defined above; and (3) V/C, the log of the ratio between the vowel duration and the duration of the following /kt/. The V/C values were classified as lax /a/ or tense /aː/ separately in the monosyllabic and disyllabic and separately in the accented and deaccented contexts following the procedure in Harrington et al (2013). These (Gaussian) classifications were also carried out separately for each speaker (thus giving four separate classifications per speaker).…”

The beauty in a beast: Minimising the effects of diverse recording quality on vowel formant measurements in sociophonetic real-time studies

“…Vowel formants are the core acoustic correlates of vowel quality typically obtained in sociophonetics (but see Harrington, Kleber and Reubold (2013) for an alternative set of acoustic measures), and have been scrutinised in many studies of sound variation and change (e.g. Fought 1999;Harrington, Cox and Evans 1997;Labov 1994;Labov, Ash and Boberg 2006;Maclagan et al 2009;Mesthrie 2010).…”