Evidence against interactive effects on articulation in Javanese verb paradigms

Abstract

In interactive models of speech production, wordforms that are related to a target form are co-activated during lexical planning, and co-activated wordforms can leave phonetic traces on the target. This mechanism has been proposed to account for phonetic similarities among morphologically related wordforms. We test this hypothesis in a Javanese verb paradigm. In Javanese, one class of verbs is inflected by nasalizing an initial voiceless obstruent: one form of each word begins with a nasal, while its otherwise identical relative begins with a voiceless obstruent. We predict that if morphologically related forms are co-activated during production, the nasal-initial forms of these words should show phonetic traces of their obstruent-initial forms, as compared to nasal-initial wordforms that do not alternate. Twenty-seven native Javanese speakers produced matched pairs of alternating and non-alternating wordforms. Based on an acoustic analysis of nasal resonance and closure duration, we present good evidence against the original hypothesis: We find that the alternating nasals are phonetically identical to the non-alternating ones on both measures. We argue that interactive effects during lexical planning do not offer the best account for morphologically conditioned phonetic similarities. We discuss an alternative involving competition between phonotactic constraints and word-specific phonological structures.

Vowel nasalisation in Scottish Gaelic: No evidence for incomplete neutralisation in initial mutation

“…By identifying categorical and gradient patterns of nasal airflow in four speakers from Lewis, I demonstrate that only phonological nasalisation-and not phonetic nasalisation-may display morphological conditioning. These results provide further evidence that initial mutation does not bring about incomplete neutralisation, and are consistent with recent claims by Hall (2017) and Seyfarth et al (2019) regarding the kinds of morphophonological alternations with which incomplete neutralisation can and cannot occur.…”

“…However, it is unlikely that this alone could account for the different patterns observed. Seyfarth et al (2019) make the generalisation that incomplete neutralisation is restricted to cases where word-specific morphological pressures come into conflict with language-wide phonotactic constraints, based on their finding that it does not occur in connection with Javanese nasal substitution. In the case of final devoicing, the morphological requirement that a word such as German Rad /öa:d/ 'wheel' have a voiced final obstruent is pitched against a phonotactic requirement that word-final obstruents be voiceless, resulting in incomplete neutralisation with Rat /öa:t/ 'advice'.…”

“…It is also possible to measure nasalisation acoustically by spectral analysis (e.g. Chen 1996Chen , 1997Beddor 2007;Carignan et al 2011;Shosted et al 2012;Li 2014;Zellou and Tamminga 2014;Scarborough et al 2015;Cho et al 2017;Seyfarth et al 2019), although the effect of nasalisation on formant values is often complex. An uninvasive, highly practical technique involves measuring the rate of nasal airflow at the nostrils in order to obtain an indirect measure of velic opening (e.g.…”

Incomplete neutralization and the blueprint model of production

“…Exemplar models have also been popular in accounting for incomplete neutralization (Kleber et al, 2010;Winter & Röettger, 2011;Röettger et al, 2014) (but see (Seyfarth et al, 2019)). In these types of models, the lexicon contains both roots and inflected forms for all lexical items.…”