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

Abstract

Abstract:The study tests a model of sound change based on how prosodic weakening affects shortening in polysyllabic words. Twenty-nine L1-German speakers produced minimal pairs differing in vowel tensity in both monosyllables /zakt, zaːkt/ and disyllables /zaktə, zaːktə/. The target words were produced in accented and deaccented contexts. The duration ratio between the vowel and the following /kt/ cluster was less for lax than tense vowels and less for disyllables than monosyllables. Under deaccentuation, there was an approximation of tense and lax vowels towards each other but no influence due to the mono-vs. disyllabic difference. On the other hand, Gaussian /a/ vs. /aː/ classifications of these data showed a lesser influence due to the syllable count in deaccented words. Compatibly, when the same speakers as listeners classified synthetic sackt-sagt and sackte-sagte continua, they were shown to compensate for the syllable count differences, but to a lesser extent in a deaccented context. Deaccentuation may therefore provide the conditions for sound change to take place by which /aː/ shortens in polysyllabic words; it may do so because the association between coarticulation and the source that gives rise to it is hidden to a greater extent than in accented contexts.

Sources of variability in phonetic perception: The joint influence of listener and talker characteristics on perception of the Korean stop contrast

“…Bang, Sonderegger, Kang, Clayards, and Yoon (2015) found that both VOT merger and f0 enhancement in the Seoul lenis-aspirated contrast disproportionately affect high-frequency words (which tend to be hypo-articulated or reduced). Similarly, Harrington, Kleber, Reubold, and Siddins (2015) found that the German tense-lax vowel distinction is more merged when de-accented (also a context for hypoarticulation), and thus more likely to induce misperception. Examination of different speech styles more likely to show hypoarticulation might therefore reveal an incipient change in Hunchun production.…”

The coarticulation-duration relationship in early Quechua speech

“…Since coarticulation and duration are negatively correlated, this analysis predicts that duration would decrease as a function of the number of syllables in a word for children. As such, the children's productions would reflect the phenomenon of Compensatory Shortening (also known as polysyllabic shortening), or the tendency for segment durations to shorten in longer-duration and/or polysyllabic words (Harrington et al 2015;Lehiste & Shockey 1972;Munhall et al 1992).…”

“…One additional difference between the adults and children was that children compensated for word length by shortening the duration of their VC sequences in longer words (or, variably, lengthening duration in the shorter words). This phenomenon is known as compensatory shortening (Harrington et al 2015;Lehiste 1972;Munhall et al 1992). 17 While children demonstrated a tradeoff in sequence duration and prosodic word size, adults were insensitive to word size.…”

“…17 The term compensatory shortening is also variably used in the literature to refer to shortening of stressed vowels compared to unstressed vowels in the context of polysyllabicity (Harrington et al 2015), or the shortening of stressed vowels in the context of unstressed vowels and consonants (Fowler 1981).…”

Effects of prosodic prominence on obstruent-intrinsic F0 and VOT in German

“…Despite the ubiquity of this shift, it remains unclear exactly how it takes place. Presumably, some listener/learner needs to arrive at a novel parse of the signal, either due to error [14], mode of perception [15], or ambiguity of the coarticulatory source [16,17]. This leads us to ask if there are contexts in which the salience of microprosodic cues might increase or even come to dominate the perceptual parse.…”