Alan C. L. Yu

Understanding near mergers: the case of morphological tone in Cantonese*

A growing body of work on exemplar-based theories of learning suggests the possibility of formal models of phonological representation which will offer deeper explanations of basic phonological properties than current models allow. The main purpose of this paper is to shed light on near merger, a recalcitrant problem in sound change and in phonological theory, with this newer perspective, through a case study of tonal near merger in Cantonese.

Origins of sound change : approaches to phonologization

PART I: WHAT IS PHONOLOGIZATION 1. Enlarging the Scope of Phonologization 2. Certainty and Expectation in Phonologization and Language PART II: PHONETIC CONSIDERATIONS 3. Phonetic Bias in Sound Change 4. From Long to Short and From Short to Long: Perceptual motivations for changes in vocalic length 5. Inibitory Mechanisms in Speech Planning Maintain and Maximie Contrast 6. Developmental Perspectives on phonological Typology and Sound Change PART III: PHONOLOGICAL AND MORPHOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS 7. Lexical Sensitivity to Phonetic and Phonological Pressures 8. Phonologization and the Typology of Feature Behaviour 9. Rapid Learning of Morphologically Conditioned Phonetics: Vowel nasalization across a boundary PART IV: SOCIAL AND COMPUTATIONAL DYNAMICS 10. Individual Variation in Socio-cognitive Processing and Sound Change 11. The Role of Probabilistic Enhancement in Phonologization 12. Modelling the Emergence of Vowel Harmony Through Iterated Learning 13. Variation and Change in English Noun/Verb Pair Stress: Data, dynamical systems models, and their interaction

Phonetic imitation from an individual-difference perspective: subjective attitude, personality and "autistic" traits.

Numerous studies have documented the phenomenon of phonetic imitation: the process by which the production patterns of an individual become more similar on some phonetic or acoustic dimension to those of her interlocutor. Though social factors have been suggested as a motivator for imitation, few studies has established a tight connection between language-external factors and a speaker’s likelihood to imitate. The present study investigated the phenomenon of phonetic imitation using a within-subject design embedded in an individual-differences framework. Participants were administered a phonetic imitation task, which included two speech production tasks separated by a perceptual learning task, and a battery of measures assessing traits associated with Autism-Spectrum Condition, working memory, and personality. To examine the effects of subjective attitude on phonetic imitation, participants were randomly assigned to four experimental conditions, where the perceived sexual orientation of the narrator (homosexual vs. heterosexual) and the outcome (positive vs. negative) of the story depicted in the exposure materials differed. The extent of phonetic imitation by an individual is significantly modulated by the story outcome, as well as by the participant’s subjective attitude toward the model talker, the participant’s personality trait of openness and the autistic-like trait associated with attention switching.

The stability of perceptual compensation for coarticulation within and across individuals: A cross-validation study

Perceptual compensation for coarticulation (PCCA) refers to listener responses consistent with perceptual reduction of the acoustic effects of the coarticulatory context on a target sound. The robustness of PCCA across individuals and across tasks have not been studied together previously. This study reports the results of two experiments designed to determine the robustness of perceptual compensation for vocalic influence on sibilant perception across tasks and the stability of such compensatory response within an individual. Identification and discrimination data, collected in the laboratory and on Amazons Mechanical Turk, showed that individuals are moderately stable in their PCCA responses across tasks and the level of stability is consistent across both the lab-based and the internet-based cohorts, although some differences are observed.

Quantity, stress and reduplication in Washo

Plural internal reduplication in Washo has generated much interest in the phonological literature. This study presents a novel analysis that unifies the treatment of a set of seemingly disparate aspects of this plural reduplication pattern (e.g. variation in the placement and size of the reduplicant, contrastive vowel length in stressed syllables, post-tonic gemination, and vowel-length inheritance in reduplication), relying on the interaction between constraints on weight assignment, affix anchoring and stress assignment. In particular, the odd placement of the plural reduplicant in roots with internal consonant sequences and the restricted distribution of long vowels in Washo can be attributed to a previously unnoticed emerging preference for heavy stressed syllables on the surface. The results of this study have implications for theories of reduplication and theories of weight phenomena in general.

Stress assignment in Tohono O'odham*

The proper treatment of N-D E B (NDEB), also known as the Derived Environment Constraint, has long been the subject of debate by phonologists. Past approaches include the Strict Cycle Condition (Mascaro! 1976), the Elsewhere Condition (Kiparsky 1982) and underspecification (Kiparsky 1993). However, since the introduction of Optimality Theory (McCarthy & Prince 1993, 1994, Prince & Smolensky 1993), phonologists have tried to model NDEB in terms of parameterised constraints (e.g. Burzio 1997) or constraint conjunction (e.g. Łubowicz 1998). In this paper I present a case of NDEB found in the stress patterns of Tohono O’odham words. Secondary stress is assigned to all odd-numbered syllables in derived words, but is blocked on word-final oddnumbered syllables in underived words. I claim that all the presented facts about Tohono O’odham stress can be accounted for in terms of cophonologies (cf. Orgun 1996, Inkelas et al. 1997, Inkelas 1998). By showing the intricate interaction between, on the one hand, stress assignment to latent vowels and, on the other, their behaviour with respect to perfective truncation, I argue that Tohono O’odham stress can be viewed as being assigned ‘cyclically’ and also as exhibiting the effect of bracket erasure. These facts, as I will show, are captured naturally by the co-phonology model. This co-phonology analysis is contrasted with the

On measuring phonetic precursor robustness: a response to Moreton

What factors shape the synchronic typology of sound patterns and how should they be detected? To the extent that the synchronic typology of sound patterns follows from the results of language change, it is commonly, if not implicitly, assumed that analytic and channel biases are two major factors involved in shaping phonological typology (Zuraw 2007; Wilson 2006; Moreton 2008, 2010). Analytic biases are limitations in computation or markedness relations and constraints imposed by the Universal Grammar. An analytic bias might render certain patterns difficult to acquire even from perfect learning data. Channel bias refers to the relative likelihood of phonetic precursor to sound change becoming phonologized into full fledged sound patterns (e.g., Hyman 1976; Ohala 1993; Lindblom et al. 1995; Hume and Johnson 2001; Blevins 2004). This view of phonological typology is motivated by the commonly held assumption that sound patterns and sound changes that recur across unrelated languages originate in properties of human articulatory, perceptual and/or auditory mechanisms (Ohala 1983, 1993; Beddor et al. 2007). Context-induced phonetic variation in speech production and perception is taken to be the phonetic precursors to listener misperceptionbased sound changes. Phonologization refers to this transition of gradient phonetic variation (i.e. intrinsic allophones) becoming entrenched and developing into categorical phonological ∗I have benefitted tremendously from discussion with Sharon Peperkamp and Morgan Sonderegger and comments from the three anonymous reviewers, the associate editors, and the audiences at the Manchester Phonology Meeting in 2009, the Workshop on Computational Modeling of Sound Pattern Acquisition at the University of Alberta, University of Pittsburgh, Michigan State University, and Stony Brook University. Naturally, all errors are my own. This material is based upon work partially supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0949754. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

The phonetics of quantity alternation in Washo

Abstract Stress-sensitive quantity alternation is commonplace in the Uralic languages and many of the Germanic languages in and around the Scandinavia region, but few reports have detailed similar types of alternation in Native American languages. This study offers a quantitative analysis of the complementary length alternation between tonic vowels and post-tonic consonants in two generations of speakers of Washo, a severely moribund Hokan language spoken by approximately 13 elderly speakers near the California–Nevada border southeast of Lake Tahoe. The complementary alternation of vowel and consonant length is argued to be motivated by a previously unnoticed requirement in the language to keep the stressed syllable heavy. This paper reports the results of an acoustic study verifying the phonetic reality of this alternation by comparing the speech of two generations of speakers of Washo based on archival audio recordings made in the 1950s and recent fieldwork materials. The results show that the quantity alternation is much more pervasive in the language than it was first described in the 1960s. It is shown that the current generation of Washo speakers retains subtle phonetic alternations, despite the fact they mostly grew up bilingual, if not English-dominant. Their command of Washo phonetics and phonology does not seem to have undergone severe attrition. However, their realization of post-tonic long consonants was not as long in relative duration as the earlier generation. These results show the value of supplementing transcription with direct measurement, even with small numbers of speakers.

Aerodynamic constraints on sound change: The case of syllabic sibilants

High vowels are known to assimilate in place of articulation and frication to a preceding sibilant. Such an assimilation process is found in an historical sound change from Middle Chinese to Modern Mandarin (e.g., */si/ became [sz] ‘‘poetry’’). However, such assibilation is systematically absent when the vowel is followed by a nasal consonant. This paper investigates the co‐occurrence restriction between nasalization and frication, demonstrating that pharyngeal pressure is so significantly vented during the opening of the velic valve that the necessary pressure buildup behind the constriction of a fricative is consequently severely diminished, resulting in no audible turbulence. It reports the aerodynamic effects of nasalization on vowels, as spoken by a native speaker of American English (presumed to parallel the phonetic conditions present in Middle Chinese). The results reveal that in comparison to oral vowels the pharyngeal pressure, volume velocity, and particle velocity decrease dramatically when hi...

Perceived Masculinity Predicts U.S. Supreme Court Outcomes.

Previous studies suggest a significant role of language in the court room, yet none has identified a definitive correlation between vocal characteristics and court outcomes. This paper demonstrates that voice-based snap judgments based solely on the introductory sentence of lawyers arguing in front of the Supreme Court of the United States predict outcomes in the Court. In this study, participants rated the opening statement of male advocates arguing before the Supreme Court between 1998 and 2012 in terms of masculinity, attractiveness, confidence, intelligence, trustworthiness, and aggressiveness. We found significant correlation between vocal characteristics and court outcomes and the correlation is specific to perceived masculinity even when judgment of masculinity is based only on less than three seconds of exposure to a lawyer’s speech sample. Specifically, male advocates are more likely to win when they are perceived as less masculine. No other personality dimension predicts court outcomes. While this study does not aim to establish any causal connections, our findings suggest that vocal characteristics may be relevant in even as solemn a setting as the Supreme Court of the United States.