Explaining the Phoneme: Why (Some Of) Phonology Is Natural

Churma, Donald G.

doi:10.3765/bls.v11i0.1892

Cited by 1 publication

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“…The role played by phonological knowledge in perception is not easy to model in traditional rule-based generative theories, which restrict their formalisation to the production process, that is, the mapping from underlying to surface form. In such models, one could think about perception as a process of rule inversion (Leben & Robinson 1977), which, though, has been shown to come with several problems (Churma 1981).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Formalising phonological perception: The role of voicing assimilation in consonant cluster perception in Emilian dialects

Cavirani¹,

Hamann²

2022

J. Ling.

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Speech perception is influenced by language-specific phonological knowledge. While phonotactics has long been established to play a role, the study of how phonological alternations influence perception is still in its infancy. In this paper, we make a case for the latter by investigating the role of regressive voicing assimilation (RVA) in the perception of obstruent clusters in Emilian dialects of Italian. We provide empirical evidence from a phoneme-detection task, in which Emilian listeners reported to have heard [b] significantly more often in stimuli with a /p/ before a voiced obstruent (RVA context) than before a vowel (non-RVA context). Our experimental findings add to recent work on the influence of phonology on speech perception. In addition, we provide an explicit formalisation, which bolsters the need for a rigid distinction between phonetic, surface and underlying representation, and an explicit mapping between all three, both in the process of speech production and comprehension.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%