Kathleen Currie Hall

A typology of intermediate phonological relationships

Abstract This paper presents an overview of phonological relationships that are “intermediate” between contrast and allophony. As has been observed for many years, such intermediate relationships occur widely in the worlds languages, yet they are often simply relegated to being exceptional cases or ignored in linguistic analyses. While there is a set of criteria that can be used to define relationships, these criteria may conflict with one another or be inadequate in certain cases. Thus, relationships may be intermediate for a number of reasons, including issues with: the concept of predictability of distribution; the existence of foreign or specialized strata of a language; variability and gradience; frequency; theory-internal classifications; and phonetic factors. Each of these is discussed in turn, with examples from the literature. In addition to this basic typology of intermediate phonological relationships, the paper also lays out a number of different kinds of approaches that have been taken to accommodate intermediate relationships in the phonological grammar and summarizes the issues to be resolved in future work.

The role of predictability in shaping phonological patterns

Abstract A diverse set of empirical findings indicate that word predictability in context influences the fine-grained details of both speech production and comprehension. In particular, lower predictability relative to similar competitors tends to be associated with phonetic enhancement, while higher predictability is associated with phonetic reduction. We review evidence that these in-the-moment biases can shift the prototypical pronunciations of individual lexical items, and that over time, these shifts can promote larger-scale phonological changes such as phoneme mergers. We argue that predictability-associated enhancement and reduction effects are based on predictability at the level of meaning-bearing units (such as words) rather than at sublexical levels (such as segments) and present preliminary typological evidence in support of this view. Based on these arguments, we introduce a Bayesian framework that helps generate testable predictions about the type of enhancement and reduction patterns that are more probable in a given language.

Perceptual confusability of French vowels

The confusability of sounds is argued to both reflect phonological structure (e.g., Boomershine et al. 2008) and be a source of phonological variability and change (e.g., Ohala 1981, Hume 1998). We present the results of a perception task in which 25 Parisian French-speaking participants identified the French vowels [i e e y o/ œ ə a u o ɔ ɔ e ɑ], or ∅, in an aC_Ca context, using standard orthography in key words. We can therefore determine which vowels are most confusable with each other (and thus likely to be the target for either mergers or dissimilatory processes) and which are most confusable with zero (and thus likely to be the target of processes such as deletion, assimilation, and metathesis). Results show high accuracy for [a i y u]; some degree of confuability within the nasal vowels; high confusability rates within the mid-front rounded vowels; and a tendency for zero to be confused with one of the mid-front rounded vowels. These results align with observed phonological patterns in French.

Using ultrasound to examine contrastive hyperarticulation

The current paper examines the extent to which there is cross-linguistic evidence for the hyperarticulation of more phonologically contrastive vowel sounds. Hall et al. [2017, JCAA 45: 15] found that tense vowels in English are produced with more total tongue movement when in positions where they are more phonologically contrastive. This finding was established through the use of Optical Flow Analysis [Horn & Schunck 1981] on ultrasound videos of the tongue. The “more contrastive” positions were those in which the vowels could contrast with their lax vowel counterparts, while the “less contrastive” positions were those in which no such contrast was possible. While there was evidence that the degree of contrast affected the tongue movements, the data were somewhat confounded by the fact that the more contrastive positions were largely closed syllables, while the less contrastive positions were largely open syllables. In the current paper, we first replicate the original results with more tightly controlled phonetic contexts in English and then examine analogous results for Canadian French. Crucially, in Canadian French, [e] vs. [ɛ] contrast in open syllables and not in closed, such that the effects of syllable position and phonological contrast can be teased apart. [Funded by SSHRC.]The current paper examines the extent to which there is cross-linguistic evidence for the hyperarticulation of more phonologically contrastive vowel sounds. Hall et al. [2017, JCAA 45: 15] found that tense vowels in English are produced with more total tongue movement when in positions where they are more phonologically contrastive. This finding was established through the use of Optical Flow Analysis [Horn & Schunck 1981] on ultrasound videos of the tongue. The “more contrastive” positions were those in which the vowels could contrast with their lax vowel counterparts, while the “less contrastive” positions were those in which no such contrast was possible. While there was evidence that the degree of contrast affected the tongue movements, the data were somewhat confounded by the fact that the more contrastive positions were largely closed syllables, while the less contrastive positions were largely open syllables. In the current paper, we first replicate the original results with more tightly controlled...

An acoustic analysis of /æ/ variation and its relationship to perceived sexual orientation in American English.

Munson et al. [J. Phonetics (2006)] found that 11 self‐identified gay and 11 heterosexual men produced different variants of the vowel /ae/, with gay men producing lower, more retracted variants and heterosexual men producing higher, more tense variants. Listeners’ performance in a perception task in which they rated these talkers’ sexual orientation was correlated with these measures: talkers with higher, more‐tense /ae/ were rated as sounding more heterosexual than talkers with lower, more retracted /ae/. However, Smith et al. [New Ways of Analyzing Variation (2008)] found the opposite pattern in an experiment in which listeners rated the sexual orientation of productions by 10 trained talkers of sentences containing either tense or retracted /ae/ variants. A different group of listeners showed the same pattern when rating the /ae/ words excised from these sentences, though these listeners replicated Munson et al.’s original finding when presented with the /ae/ words from the original 22 talkers. An attempt t...

The perception of intermediate phonological relationships.

It has been shown that pairs of segments that are allophonic in a language are perceived as being more similar than pairs that are contrastive in a language [Boomershine et al., (2008)]. There is also evidence that neutralized contrasts in a language are perceived as more similar than non‐neutralized contrasts [Hume and Johnson (2003)]. Third, there is evidence that phonological relationships should be defined along a continuum of predictability, rather than as a categorical distinction between “allophonic” and “contrastive” [Hall (2008)]. In combination, these facts predict that pairs of segments that fall along a cline of predictability of distribution should also fall along a cline of perceived similarity. This paper presents results of a perception experiment that tests this prediction by examining the perceived similarity of four pairs of sounds in German: (1) [t]‐[t∫], which is almost fully contrastive (unpredictably distributed); (2) [t]‐[d] and (3) [s]‐[∫], which are each partially contrastive (pa...

The influence of language experience on perception: The case of Spanish and English

Native speakers can distinguish sounds that serve a contrastive function in their language better than those that do not, but the role of allophony in speech perception is understudied. The present study tests the influence of the allophonic/phonemic distinction on ratings of perceptual similarity given by Spanish and English listeners to pairs of stimuli contrasting [d], [r], and [■]. These sounds have different phonological relations in the two languages: [d] and [r] are allophonic in English and contrastive in Spanish, while [d] vs [■] are allophonic in Spanish but contrastive in English. The study also investigated to what extent, if any, degree of experience/proficiency with a non‐native language influences perception. The results suggest that native language but not level of language proficiency in L2 affects rated similarity. In particular, whether or not sounds are in an allophonic or contrastive relationship in the native language shapes how these sounds are perceived. [Work supported by NIDCD Gr...