Positional Markedness as a By-Product of the Learning Situation

Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on Phonetic Sources of Phonological Patterns: Synchronic and Diachronic Explanations (2003

El debilitamiento de las oclusivas coronales en francés y en español: pruebas electopalatográficas

Lenition of voiced and, to a lesser extent, voiceless stops is widely attested in Western Romance languages. In Spanish, utterance-initial voiced stops as well as those following nasals alternate with approximants in intervocalic position. Acoustic and articulatory studies have revealed factors that condition phonetic weakening. In contrast, very little is known about stop weakening in French. In this paper, using electropalatography, we provide articulatory evidence for the lenition of /t d/ in both Spanish and French. Data obtained from seven Spanish-speaking and four French-speaking participants reveal that, in both languages, /d/ is produced with less linguopalatal contact than /t/, and these differences are strongly conditioned by the position within the utterance or word. The languages differ, however, in the degree of /d/ lenition as well as in some of the contextual conditioning factors. Overall, our results, which should be interpreted with some caution given the number of speakers and the balance of the stimuli set, show that French resembles other Romance languages in its phonetic patterns of lenition, differing mainly in the degree of weakening.El debilitamiento de las oclusivas sonoras, y, en menor medida, el de las sordas, es un proceso frecuente en las lenguas románicas. En español, las oclusivas sonoras en posición inicial absoluta y después de nasal alternan con aproximantes en posición intervocálica. Aunque se han realizado estudios articulatorios y acústicos acerca del debilitamiento en español, poco se sabe acerca de los patrones de debilitamiento en francés. En este trabajo, se presenta evidencia sobre el debilitamiento de /t d/ en ambas lenguas, por medio de datos obtenidos de cuatro hablantes de francés y siete de español usando electropalatografía (EPG). Los resultados muestran que en ambas lenguas /d/ se articula con menos contacto linguo-palatal que /t/ y que las diferencias en los patrones de contacto están condicionadas por la posición en la palabra y en la frase. Ambas lenguas difieren en el grado de debilitamiento de /d/ y en algunos de los factores contextuales que lo afectan. En resumen, los resultados provenientes de esta pequeña muestra de hablantes revelan que el francés se asemeja a otras lenguas románicas en los patrones fonéticos de debilitamiento, aunque difiere en el grado de debilitamiento

Gradient and Categorical Effects in Native and Non-native Nasal-rhotic Coordination

Languages are known to differ in their patterns of consonant-to-consonant coordination. Acquisition of a second language (L2) therefore involves learning these language-specific coordination patterns and the corresponding coarticulation and assimilation processes within and across words. This paper seeks to determine whether L2 learners of English acquire the target pattern of gradient assimilation of the nasal + rhotic sequence in English (e.g. in Rome). Electropalatographic data were obtained from nine learners of English (native speakers of French, Japanese, and Spanish) and three Canadian English controls. The results revealed that, although the learners had largely acquired the English rhotic articulation, most of them (Japanese and Spanish speakers, in particular) had not fully mastered the target C-C coordination patterns. This is consistent with findings of previous acoustic studies of L2 timing and coarticulation, highlighting the difficulty of acquiring gradient phonetic phenomena

Acoustic Classification of Russian Plain and Palatalized Sibilant Fricatives: Spectral vs. Cepstral Measures

This study compares two methods for classifying voiceless sibilant fricatives forming a 4-way phonemic contrast found in Russian, but otherwise cross-linguistically rare. One method uses spectral measures, i.e. vowel formants, COG, duration and intensity of frication. The second method uses cepstral coefficients extracted from different regions inside fricatives and neighboring vowels. The corpus comprises 1,431 plain and palatalized fricatives from two places of articulation, produced by 10 speakers. Logistic regression was used to classify the productions of males and females together and separately. The productions of females yielded higher correct classification rates (highest 91.9%). Cepstral measures outperformed spectral measures across-the-board

Phonetic variability and grammatical knowledge: an articulatory study of Korean place assimilation.

The study reported here uses articulatory data to investigate Korean place assimilation of coronal stops followed by labial or velar stops, both within words and across words. The results show that this place-assimilation process is highly variable, both within and across speakers, and is also sensitive to factors such as the place of articulation of the following consonant, the presence of a word boundary and, to some extent, speech rate. Gestures affected by the process are generally reduced categorically (deleted), while sporadic gradient reduction of gestures is also observed. We further compare the results for coronals to our previous findings on the assimilation of labials, discussing implications of the results for grammatical models of phonological/phonetic competence. The results suggest that speakers’ language-particular knowledge of place assimilation has to be relatively detailed and context-sensitive, and has to encode systematic regularities about its obligatory/variable application as well as categorical/gradient realisation

Editors' Note

Editors' Note for the Proceedings of the 2021 Annual Meeting on Phonology (AMP 2021), held at York University in October 2021

Learning phonetically and phonologically natural classes through constraint indexation

Phonological processes tend to be defined over natural classes (Chomsky & Halle 1968), but there are some arbitrary and language-specific aspects to class behaviour (e.g., Mielke 2004). This paper shows that it is possible to implement a procedure of finding language specific natural classes using contrast detection (Dresher 2014, Sanstedt 2018), but in standard OT with domain-general methods. Three toy languages are constructed, based on those in Prickett & Jarosz (2021), in which /e/ raises to [i] in the presence of a high vowel and in which /s/ palatalizes to [ʃ] before [i]. In one language, raising feeds palatalization (transparent); in the second, raising counterfeeds palatalization (opaque); in the third, raising applies transparently, but only in certain morphemes (lexically specific). All three languages are learned with a version of Round’s (2017) learner that learns indexed constraints (Pater 2000) that are attached to specific segments in morphemes rather than entire morphemes (cf. Nazarov 2021). This learner is able to find appropriate natural classes for these data, both phonetic natural classes (=traditional natural classes) and what I call phonologically natural classes (classes defined by having certain phonetic properties and undergoing a range of phonological processes), showing the feasibility of this approach

Palatalization and glide strengthening as competing repair strategies: Evidence from Kirundi

Alternations involving place-changing palatalization (e.g. t+j → ʧ in spirit – spiritual) are very common and have been a focus of much generative phonological work since Chomsky & Halle’s (1968) ‘Sound Pattern of English’. The interest in palatalization and its mechanisms (see e.g. Sagey 1990; Chen 1996; Bateman 2007) has somewhat obscured the question of how these processes fit into a wider typology of segmental alternations. What happens when palatalization fails to apply? Do other processes take its place and apply under the same circumstances? In this paper, I argue for a close functional and formal affinity between place-changing palatalization and one such process, palatal glide strengthening (e.g. p+j → pc). As evidence I present data from Kirundi (Bantu) on the realization of consonant + palatal and velar glide sequences within and across morphemes. As will be shown, palatalization and glide strengthening in Kirundi work in parallel, affecting different subsets of consonants. Specifically, palatalization targets C+j sequences with laryngeals, velars, nasal coronals, and – across morpheme boundaries – non-nasal coronals. In contrast, glide strengthening targets C+j sequences with labials and – within morphemes – non-nasal coronals. In addition, glide strengthening applies to within- and across-morpheme consonant + velar glide sequences, producing a set of outputs (e.g. m+w → mŋ) similar to C+j sequences. I further present a unified Optimality Theoretic (Prince & Smolensky 1993/2004) account of these seemingly disparate phenomena as both arising from different rankings of constraints prohibiting consonant + glide sequences (parameterized by place and/or manner) and various feature-specific agreement and faithfulness constraints. Finally, I explore typological predictions of this account, reviewing several remarkably similar cases of C + glide resolution patterns from other languages, and outlining questions for further research on consonant-vowel/glide interactions