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The Relationship Between the (Mis)-Parsing of Coarticulation in Perception and Sound Change: Evidence from Dissimilation and Language Acquisition

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Recent Advances in Nonlinear Speech Processing

Part of the book series: Smart Innovation, Systems and Technologies ((SIST,volume 48))

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Abstract

The study is concerned with whether historical sound change is more likely to occur when coarticulation, or the way that speech sounds overlap with and influence each other in time, is misaligned in production and perception. The focus of the first experiment was on long-range coarticulatory lip-rounding that has been linked with historical dissimilation. A perception experiment based on present-day Italian showed that inherently lip-rounded segments were more likely to be masked—and thereby erroneously deleted—in hypoarticulated speech. The second experiment tested whether the mismatch between the modalities was more likely in young children than in adults. For this purpose, first language German speakers participated in a forced-choice perception experiment in which they categorised German back and front vowels in coarticulatory non-fronting and fronting consonantal contexts. Children’s ability to normalise for coarticulation was shown to be less than that of the adults. Taken together, the results suggest that sound change can occur when coarticulatory relationships are perceptually obscured due to a hypoarticulated speaking style causing consonants to be camouflaged in the case of dissimilation and variants to approximate those that are strongly influenced by coarticulation in the case of diachronic back vowel fronting.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by European Research Council grant number 295573 ‘Sound change and the acquisition of speech’ (2012–2017).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Phonetics and Speech Processing, Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich, Munich, Germany

    Jonathan Harrington, Felicitas Kleber & Mary Stevens

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  1. Jonathan Harrington
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Correspondence to Jonathan Harrington .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Seconda Università di Napoli and IIASS, Caserta, Italy

    Anna Esposito

  2. (Pompeu Fabra University), Escola Superior Politècnica Tecnocampus, Mataró, Spain

    Marcos Faundez-Zanuy

  3. sezione di Napoli Osservatorio, Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcan, Napoli, Italy

    Antonietta M. Esposito

  4. Department of Psychology, Seconda Universita di Napoli and IIASS, Caserta, Italy

    Gennaro Cordasco

  5. Boulevard Dolez, University of Mons, TCTS Lab.31, Mons, Belgium

    Thomas Drugman

  6. Data and Signal Processing Research Grou, University of Vic, Vic, Spain

    Jordi Solé-Casals

  7. NeuroLab, Università degli Studi "Mediterranea" di, Reggio Calabria, Italy

    Francesco Carlo Morabito

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Harrington, J., Kleber, F., Stevens, M. (2016). The Relationship Between the (Mis)-Parsing of Coarticulation in Perception and Sound Change: Evidence from Dissimilation and Language Acquisition. In: Esposito, A., et al. Recent Advances in Nonlinear Speech Processing. Smart Innovation, Systems and Technologies, vol 48. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28109-4_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28109-4_3

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