Sound change
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Sound–meaning association biases evidenced across thousands of languages Open
Significance The independence between sound and meaning is believed to be a crucial property of language: across languages, sequences of different sounds are used to express similar concepts (e.g., Russian “ptitsa,” Swahili “ndege,” and Ja…
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Word frequency effects in sound change as a consequence of perceptual asymmetries: An exemplar-based model Open
Empirically-observed word frequency effects in regular sound change present a puzzle: how can high-frequency words change faster than low-frequency words in some cases, slower in other cases, and at the same rate in yet other cases? We arg…
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Computationally, tone is different Open
This paper establishes that unbounded circumambient processes, phonological processes for which crucial information in the environment may appear unboundedly far away on both sides of a target, are common in tonal phonology, but rare in se…
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Linking Cognitive and Social Aspects of Sound Change Using Agent‐Based Modeling Open
The paper defines the core components of an interactive‐phonetic (IP) sound change model. The starting point for the IP‐model is that a phonological category is often skewed phonetically in a certain direction by the production and percept…
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Tracking word frequency effects through 130 years of sound change Open
Contemporary New Zealand English has distinctive pronunciations of three characteristic vowels. Did the evolution of these distinctive pronunciations occur in all words at the same time or were different words affected differently? We anal…
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Meaning and Linguistic Variation: The Third Wave in Sociolinguistics Open
Part I. Beginnings and Gascon: 1. The paradox of national language movements 2. Diglossia: separate and unequal 3. Back home Part II. Jocks, Burnouts and the Second Wave: 4. Clothing and geography in a suburban high school 5. Sound change …
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The Sociophonetics and Phonology of Dutch r Open
Rhotics, or r-sounds, are known to display a large amount of variation, both cross-linguistically and within particular languages. Dutch is an example of such a language. Even within what is generally regarded as the standard variety, ther…
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On the cognitive basis of contact-induced sound change: Vowel merger reversal in Shanghainese Open
This study investigates the source and status of a recent sound change in Shanghainese (Wu, Sinitic) that has been attributed to language contact with Mandarin. The change involves two vowels, /e/ and /ɛ/, reported to be merged three decad…
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Context and vowel harmony: are they essential to identify underlying word-final /s/ in Eastern Andalusian Spanish? Open
Eastern Andalusian Spanish has been studied in detail; however, scholars have focused on production and the debate regarding its phonetic and phonological features is still ongoing. This paper analyses Eastern Andalusian Spanish perceptual…
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Linking Variation in Perception and Production in Sound Change: Evidence from Dutch Obstruent Devoicing Open
This study investigates the link between the perception and production in sound change in progress, both at the regional and the individual level. Two devoicing processes showing regional variation in Dutch are studied: the devoicing of in…
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A phonological reconstruction of proto-kawapanan Open
This paper aims to provide a full diachronic account of the segmental correspondences between two extant Kawapanan languages of Peruvian Amazonia, Shawi and Shiwilu. I put forward a reconstruction of the phonological system of Proto-Kawapa…
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The individual in the semiotic landscape Open
I present the extreme proposal that change spreads by virtue of its role in a system of social meaning. And since individuals cannot construct meaning on their own, they can play no elemental role in sound change. Based on ethnographic-var…
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Relative cue weighting in production and perception of an ongoing sound change in Southern Yi Open
Multiple co-varying cues for a phonological contrast are often introduced by coarticulation, and sound change occurs when their relative weighting shifts. The central issues for this kind of sound change include how cue weighting shifts ov…
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Associating the origin and spread of sound change using agent-based modelling applied to /s/-retraction in English Open
The study explored whether an asymmetric phonetic overlap between speech sounds could be turned into sound change through propagation around a community of speakers. The focus was on the change of /s/ to /ʃ/ which is known to be more likel…
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Contrast in Phonology, 1867–1967: History and Development Open
This article surveys the history of contrast in phonology from Bell's Visible Speech ( 1867 ) until Chomsky & Halle's Sound Pattern of English ( 1968 ). Phonological contrast can be viewed at the segmental and subsegmental (feature) levels…
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The Life Cycle of Phonological Processes: Accounting for Dialectal Microtypologies Open
This article reviews and exemplifies the theory of the life cycle of phonological processes and illustrates how diachronic phonological changes can be accounted for in a stratal/cyclic model of phonology. The life cycle captures the fact t…
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Frequency effects on the vowel length contrast merger in Seoul Korean Open
This paper presents an apparent-time study of the vowel length contrast merger in Seoul Korean based on duration measurements of over 370,000 vowels in word-initial syllables in a read-speech corpus. The effects of word frequency on vowel …
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The early influence of phonology on a phonetic change Open
The conventional wisdom regarding the diachronic process whereby phonetic phenomena become phonologized appears to be the ‘error accumulation’ model, so called by Baker, Archangeli, and Mielke (2011). Under this model, biases in the phonet…
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Improved computational models of sound change shed light on the history of the Tukanoan languages Open
Improved computational models of sound change shed light on the history of the Tukanoan languages * There has been much debate regarding the internal history of the Tukanoan languages during the last four decades, with different classifica…
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Towards a new comparison of the pre-Proto-Tocharian and pre-Proto-Samoyed vowel systems Open
During their migration from the Eastern European steppes to the Tarim Basin, the ancestors of the Tocharians must have come into contact with speakers of different languages, which may have influenced the early Tocharian language. Early Ur…
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Pushes and pulls from below: Anatomical variation, articulation and sound change Open
This paper argues that inter-individual and inter-group variation in language acquisition, perception, processing and production, rooted in our biology, may play a largely neglected role in sound change. We begin by discussing the patterni…
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3. Tonogenesis and tonal alternations in Khaling Open
In this paper, we present a historical account for the tonal alternations observed in the Khaling verbal system.We show that most of these alternations can be explained by two series of sound change.First, level and falling tones appeared …
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The unstoppable glottal: tracking rapid change in an iconic British variable Open
This article presents a sociolinguistic investigation of a rapidly expanding innovation in the UK, glottal replacement, in a variety spoken in northeast Scotland. Quantitative analysis of the form shows a dramatic change in apparent time: …
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Individuals, communities, and sound change: an introduction Open
Do individual differences affect sound change? Traditional approaches to phonetic and phonological change typically downplay differences between the individuals who make up a speech community that is undergoing change, but this has been qu…
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Fronting of Southern British English high-back vowels in articulation and acoustics Open
The fronting of the two high-back vowels /uː/ and /ʊ/ in Southern British English is very well documented, but mainly in the acoustic domain. This paper presents articulatory (ultrasound) data, comparing the relative tongue position of the…
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Toward an individual-difference perspective on phonologization Open
Phonologization is often understood to be a process along the pathway of sound change where low-level physiological or perceptual variation that gives rise to sound patterns is explicitly encoded in the grammar. The nature of this transiti…
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Changing Words and Sounds: The Roles of Different Cognitive Units in Sound Change Open
This study considers the role of different cognitive units in sound change: phonemes , contextual variants and words . We examine /u/‐fronting and /j/‐dropping in data from three generations of Derby English speakers. We analyze dynamic fo…
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Consonant strengthening: A crosslinguistic survey and articulatory proposal Open
Given the common intuition that consonant lenition occurs more often than fortition, we formulate this as a hypothesis, defining these sound change types in terms of decrease or increase in oral constriction. We then test the hypothesis on…
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Reconceptualizing the vowel space in analyzing regional dialect variation and sound change in American English Open
Vowel space area (VSA) calculated on the basis of corner vowels has emerged as a metric for the study of regional variation, speech intelligibility and speech development. This paper gives an evaluation of the basic assumptions underlying …
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The statistical analysis of acoustic phonetic data: exploring differences between spoken Romance languages Open
The historical and geographical spread from older to more modern languages has long been studied by examining textual changes and in terms of changes in phonetic transcriptions. However, it is more difficult to analyze language change from…