Incomplete Neutralization in American English Flapping: A Production Study

This paper presents a production study of incomplete neutralization in American English flapping. In flapping, /d/ and /t/ both become a voiced flap in certain prosodic contexts (see, e.g., Kahn 1980). A number of studies show that this neutralization is incomplete: /d/-flaps can be distinguished from /t/-flaps on the surface (Fox and Terbeek 1977). Other studies, however, have found conflicting results (Port 1976). This study finds that flapping is an incompletely neutralizing process—/d/-flaps and /t/-flaps can be distinguished on the surface by the duration of the preceding vowel, at least for some speakers. Additionally, some studies find evidence that hyperarticulation and orthography have an effect on whether neutralization is complete or incomplete (Fourakis and Iverson 1984, Warner et al. 2006). The present study employed two tasks: a minimal pair reading task, designed to increase these potential effects, and a morphological paradigm completion/ wug task, designed to reduce these effects. No significant differences between the two tasks were found, thus failing to support the claim that incomplete neutralization is due to these extragrammatical factors

The productivity of ‘unnatural’ labial palatalization in Xhosa

Xhosa (Bantu, South Africa) has a pattern of labial palatalization.  When the passive suffix /-w-/ is added to a stem ending in a labial, the labial becomes palatal (uku-lum-a → uku-luɲ-w-a).  Two main types of analysis have been proposed for this alternation: (i) the ‘phonological analysis’, which states that the alternation is part of speakers' synchronic phonological grammar, and (ii) the ‘lexical analysis’, which states that speakers learn the palatalized passive forms as part of their lexical knowledge.         To distinguish between the two hypotheses, we conducted a wug test in which speakers of Xhosa were shown nonce verbs and asked to provide their corresponding passive form.  Since the phonological analysis requires there to be a synchronic phonological rule, speakers should passivize nonce forms in the conditioning environment.  Under the lexical analysis, however, speakers are predicted not to palatalize nonce forms, since the real-word palatalized passives they produce are simply stored in the lexicon.         Our results show a great deal of inter-speaker variation.  While some speakers produced palatalized nonce forms nearly 100% of the time, other speakers failed to produce any palatalized nonce forms at all.  We argue that labial palatalization may be analyzed in different ways by different speakers

Incomplete Neutralization in Japanese Monomoraic Lengthening

Incomplete neutralization (IN) (Port et al. 1981, Fourakis & Iverson 1984, Port & O'Dell 1985) refers to cases in which two underlyingly distinct segments become nearly identical on the surface. IN has posed a challenge for traditional views of the phonetics-phonology interface. While classical modular feedforward architectures (e.g. Chomsky & Halle 1968, Bermúdez-Otero 2007) generally do not allow underlying phonological representations to directly affect phonetic realization, incompletely neutralized contrasts show subphonemic distinctions on the surface that can only be inferred from the underlying representations. We show that the combination of two independently motivated theoretical mechanisms – paradigm uniformity (Benua 1997, Steriade 2000) and weighted phonetic constraints (Legendre et al. 1990, Zsiga 2000, Flemming 2001, Pater 2009) – automatically account for the IN patterns

Phonotactics of noun class disambiguation in Xhosa

Bantu languages are noted for their noun class systems. These noun classes tend to connect to semantic domains: e.g., humans are prototypically in classes 1 and 2. We present an experiment in which native speakers of Xhosa were shown singular nonce nouns with no semantic context, and were asked to provide the plural forms. These nouns were shown with the singular class prefix, which is ambiguous between class 5 and class 9. Historically, class 9 had a nasal prefix which triggered post-nasal alternations in stem-initial consonants. Since class 5 did not historically have a nasal, no such alternations occurred in class 5 nouns. Because of this, stems beginning with a segment that might have been the output of the historical post-nasal alternation may be interpreted as class 9, while stems beginning with segments that might have been inputs to these alternations may be interpreted as class 5.  We show that speakers follow this pattern: roots beginning with post-nasal outputs were more likely to be assigned the plural corresponding to class 9 (i.e., class 10), and roots beginning with post-nasal inputs were more likely to be assigned to the plural corresponding to class 5 (i.e., class 6)

The Phonetics of Emphatic Vowel Lengthening in English

While many languages show lexical contrasts based on duration in vowels and consonants, such lexical durational contrasts are usually limited to binary distinctions (Ladefoged & Maddieson 1996). Within the phonetically-driven phonology approach (Hayes and Steraide 2004), one explanation for this fact is that, in the spirit of Dispersion Theory (Liljencrants & Lindblom 1972, Lindblom 1986), listeners have difficulty perceiving contrasts that are above binary. An alternative articulation-based explanation is that this preference is due to difficulties in producing such fine distinctions.This paper reports two experiments, which support the first, perception-difficulty theory, based on a non-lexical use of phonetic duration: lengthening to express pragmatic emphasis (e.g. Thank you sooooo much). Experiment 1 shows that some English speakers can produce beyond-binary durational distinctions, and Experiment 2 shows English speakers do not perceive these distinctions. These findings support the view that perception is behind the preference for binary lexical duration contrasts, while eliminating the articulation-based explanatio

Amygdala-prefrontal coupling underlies individual differences in emotion regulation

Despite growing evidence on the neural bases of emotion regulation, little is known about the mechanisms underlying individual differences in cognitive regulation of negative emotion, and few studies have used objective measures to quantify regulatory success. Using a trait-like psychophysiological measure of emotion regulation, corrugator electromyography, we obtained an objective index of the ability to cognitively reappraise negative emotion in 56 healthy men (session 1), who returned 1.3 years later to perform the same regulation task using fMRI (session 2). Results indicated that the corrugator measure of regulatory skill predicted amygdala-prefrontal functional connectivity. Individuals with greater ability to down-regulate negative emotion as indexed by corrugator at session 1 showed not only greater amygdala attenuation but also greater inverse connectivity between the amygdala and several sectors of the prefrontal cortex while down-regulating negative emotion at session 2. Our results demonstrate that individual differences in emotion regulation are stable over time and underscore the important role of amygdala-prefrontal coupling for successful regulation of negative emotion

Multidimensional signals and analytic flexibility: Estimating degrees of freedom in human speech analyses

Recent empirical studies have highlighted the large degree of analytic flexibility in data analysis which can lead to substantially different conclusions based on the same data set. Thus, researchers have expressed their concerns that these researcher degrees of freedom might facilitate bias and can lead to claims that do not stand the test of time. Even greater flexibility is to be expected in fields in which the primary data lend themselves to a variety of possible operationalizations. The multidimensional, temporally extended nature of speech constitutes an ideal testing ground for assessing the variability in analytic approaches, which derives not only from aspects of statistical modeling, but also from decisions regarding the quantification of the measured behavior. In the present study, we gave the same speech production data set to 46 teams of researchers and asked them to answer the same research question, resulting insubstantial variability in reported effect sizes and their interpretation. Using Bayesian meta-analytic tools, we further find little to no evidence that the observed variability can be explained by analysts’ prior beliefs, expertise or the perceived quality of their analyses. In light of this idiosyncratic variability, we recommend that researchers more transparently share details of their analysis, strengthen the link between theoretical construct and quantitative system and calibrate their (un)certainty in their conclusions