Changing Words and Sounds: The Roles of Different Cognitive Units in Sound Change

Abstract

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 formant data and auditory judgments, using mixed effects regression methods, including generalized additive mixed models (GAMMs). /u/-fronting is reaching its end-point, showing complex conditioning by context and a frequency effect that weakens over time. /j/-dropping is declining, with low-frequency words showing more innovative variants with /j/ than high-frequency words. The two processes interact: words with variable /j/-dropping (new) exhibit more fronting than words that never have /j/ (noodle) even when the /j/ is deleted. These results support models of change that rely on phonetically detailed representations for both word- and sound-level cognitive units.

An exploratory study of voicing-related differences in vowel duration as compensatory temporal adjustment in Italian and Polish

“…The diachronic development of context-driven statistical sub-distributions can override the original causal link (Sóskuthy 2013). Under this scenario, it is not possible to discern which of the competing predictors is diachronically responsible for the relation, and either or both the compensatory mechanism and the laryngeal features could have had a role in generating the synchronic patterns (this kind of reasoning is compatible for example with exemplar theories of speech perception and production, see among others Johnson 1997;Ambridge 2018;Sóskuthy et al 2018;Todd et al 2019).…”

Editors’ Introduction and Review: Sociolinguistic Variation and Cognitive Science

“…Through synthesizing a range of work, Hay () argues in this volume that the cognitive representations of sounds and words are linked with one another, and that their representations and subsequent processing of those representations are affected by experience with the sounds in the contexts in which they frequently appear. Results from two further papers in this issue lend further support to Hay's arguments: Sóskuthy, Foulkes, Hughes, and Haddican () demonstrate that the realization of one phonetic variable is linked with the word it occurs in and whether a second phonetic variable can be found in that word. Likewise, Kim and Drager () provide new evidence confirming that lexical access is assisted by socioindexical cues in the speech signal.…”

Voice quality and coda /r/ in Glasgow English in the early 20th century

“…Second, interactions create multiple opportunities for significance testing, and, in many cases, all possible outcomes may be theoretically interesting, which increases the rate of false positives. Therefore, we take a conservative approach to evaluating predictors that are involved in interactions (see Sóskuthy, Foulkes, Hughes, & Haddican [2018] for a similar approach). Instead of relying on model summaries, we employ model comparisons based on log-likelihood tests: we first fit a nested model that excludes all terms that involve the relevant predictor and then compare this nested model to the full model.…”