The listener as a source of sound change

Ohala, John J.

doi:10.1075/cilt.323.05oha

Cited by 258 publications

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“…2 Tokens with coronal onsets, referred to here as /Tuw/, as in two, do, show moderate fronting, with the mean in the center of the vowel space on the F2 dimension. This suggests that the fronting of the vowel first started in this environment, likely as an effect of coarticulation with a preceding coronal consonant (Hall-Lew, 2011;Harrington, Kleber, & Reubold, 2008;Ohala, 1981). This differentiation between coronal and noncoronal onsets is also seen in the speech of Jim R., born in 1922, with noncoronal tokens (/Kuw/, as in goose, boot, food) showing less fronting than /Tuw/ ( Figure 2).…”

Section: Fronting Of Goosementioning

confidence: 70%

Class matters: the sociolinguistics ofgooseandgoatin Manchester English

Baranowski

2017

Lang Var Change

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A B S T R A C TThis paper reports on patterns of sociolinguistic variation and change in Manchester's GOOSE and GOAT vowels on the basis of the acoustic analysis of 122 speakers, stratified by age, gender, socioeconomic status, and ethnicity. GOOSE fronting is an internal change showing little social differentiation, except before /l/ as in school and pool, where, in contrast to most other dialects of English, GOOSE shows advanced fronting inversely correlated with socioeconomic status. GOAT fronting, on the other hand, is a change brought from outside the dialect by the highest status groups, displaying a pattern of monotonic social stratification, a female lead, and a strong effect of ethnicity. The role of attitudes toward the community in the realization of the vowels is compared with the effect of social class construed in terms of distances between social groups. Social class turns out to be a better predictor, suggesting that the role of attitudes and identity may be overestimated in research eschewing a systematic exploration of social class at the same time.The quality of the long back vowels GOOSE and GOAT has been changing in many dialects of English. The fronting of GOOSE has been found in most varieties across the English-speaking

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Section: Fronting Of Goosementioning

confidence: 70%

Class matters: the sociolinguistics ofgooseandgoatin Manchester English

Baranowski

2017

Lang Var Change

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“…Like Myers and Hansen's (2007) account, the present account of phonological word-final vowel shortening can be classified as a listener-driven phonetic account of sound change, advocated most notably by Ohala (1981), with a number of followers (e.g., Beckman et al 1992;Guion 1998;Jacewicz, Fox, and Salmons 2006). In this view, some sound changes result from ambiguity in the speech signal arising from phonetic conditioning factors such as coarticulation.…”

Section: Listener-driven Account Of Sound Changementioning

confidence: 99%

An explanation for phonological word-final vowel shortening: Evidence from Tokyo Japanese

Nakai

2013

Laboratory Phonology

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This paper offers an account for the cross-linguistic prevalence of phonological word-final vowel shortening, in the face of phonetic final lengthening, also commonly observed across languages. Two contributing factors are hypothesized: (1) an overlap in the durational distributions of short and long vowel phonemes across positions in the utterance can lead to the misidentification of phonemic vowel length and (2) the direction of bias in such misidentification is determined by the distributional properties of the short and long vowel phonemes in the region of the durational overlap. Because short vowel phonemes are typically more frequent in occurrence and less variable in duration than long vowel phonemes, long vowel phonemes are more likely to be misidentified than short vowel phonemes. Results of production and perception studies in Tokyo Japanese support these hypotheses.Satsuki Nakai: Queen Margaret University. E-mail: satsuki@ovod.net IntroductionFinal lengthening, i.e., phonetic lengthening of final elements of prosodic constituents such as the phrase and utterance, is a putative language universal found in many languages, including languages with phonemic vowel length contrasts such as Dinka (Remijsen and Gilley 2008), Estonian (Krull 1997), Finnish (Nakai et al. 2009), and Hungarian (Hockey andFagyal 1999;White and Mády 2008). Curiously, in many languages with a phonemic vowel length contrast, word-final vowel length neutralization is also commonly observed towards the short vowel phoneme (see, e.g., Buckley 1998; Myers and Hansen 2007). Myers and Hansen (2007) ask how such length neutralization often arises in the face of crosslinguistically prevalent phonetic final lengthening. Why do word-final vowels tend to be neutralized towards the short vowel phoneme if they are often in a position to be lengthened phonetically? As a solution to the apparent paradox, Myers and Hansen (2007) propose that utterance-final devoicing, reported for Unauthenticated Download Date | 5/11/18 8:46 PM 514 Satsuki Nakai various languages, may be responsible for the cross-linguistic tendency for phonological word-final vowel shortening. Myers and Hansen's (2007) proposal is based on their finding that the devoiced ending of a partially devoiced vowel is disregarded by the listener in phonemic length identification, producing perceptual shortening. This scenario may be a likely one for some languages that exhibit phonological word-final shortening, but not all, e.g., Tokyo Japanese, as we see below.In this paper, I will present an alternative account to Myers and Hansen's (2007) for the apparent paradox between the cross-linguistic tendency for phonetic final lengthening and phonological word-final vowel shortening. I will argue that the paradox is resolved by postulating two hypotheses:H1: Short and long phonemes of similar durations across positions in the utterance can produce perceptual ambiguity for these phonemes. H2: When phonemic length misidentification occurs due to distributional overlap in the durations...

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“…In this view, the differences 7 Kawahara (2011aKawahara ( , 2011b speculates about why Japanese speakers find the devoicing of non-OCPviolating geminates more natural than that of OCP-violating singletons. Beyond the speculation presented there, yet another possibility is that a constraint against voiced geminates is a phonetically natural one (Ohala 1983), whereas OCP[voice] in Japanese is not (Kawahara 2008;Ohala 1981). In fact, there is evidence that children acquiring Japanese show a stage in which they apparently do not show the effect of OCP [voice] (Fukuda and Fukuda 1994), implying that this constraint may have to be learned rather than being innate.…”

Section: 32mentioning

confidence: 99%

Testing Japanese loanword devoicing: Addressing task effects

Kawahara

2013

Linguistics

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In the loanword phonology of Japanese, voiced obstruent geminates ([bb, dd, gg]) have been claimed to devoice when they co-occur with another voiced obstruent within the same morpheme (e.g. /beddo/ → [betto] 'bed'). This devoicing pattern has contributed much to address a number of theoretical issues in the recent phonological literature. However, the relevant data have been primarily based on intuition-based data provided by Nishimura (2003) and Kawahara (2006). Kawahara (2011aKawahara ( , 2011b addressed this issue by conducting rating studies using naive native speakers of Japanese. The results generally supported the intuition-based data by Nishimura (2003) and Kawahara (2006). However, the rating studies also revealed several aspects of the devoicing pattern that go beyond the intuition-based data as well.The current study further investigates the devoicing pattern by varying several task variables. In particular, this paper builds on Kawahara (2011a, 2011b) by adding (i) nonce word stimuli, (ii) a binary yes/no experiment, and (iii) auditory stimuli. The results show that (i) nonce words and real words behave similarly, but nonce words nevertheless show less variability across different grammatical conditions than real words; (ii) the binary yes/no experiment shows results similar to those of the scale-based experiment; and (iii) while auditory stimuli yield results comparable with those of orthographic stimuli, they also show an exaggerated effect of a phonetic implementation pattern. Overall, this paper uses Japanese as a case study, and finds some task effects in phonological judgment experiments. It is hoped that this paper stimulates further experimental research on phonological judgments of other phenomena in Japanese as well as in other languages. 1 The experiments reported in this paper were first reported in a longer manuscript circulated in Introduction The phenomenon

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The listener as a source of sound change

Cited by 258 publications

References 0 publications

Class matters: the sociolinguistics ofgooseandgoatin Manchester English

Class matters: the sociolinguistics ofgooseandgoatin Manchester English

An explanation for phonological word-final vowel shortening: Evidence from Tokyo Japanese

Testing Japanese loanword devoicing: Addressing task effects

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