Whence the fuzziness? Morphological effects in interacting sound changes in Southern British English

Strycharczuk, Patrycja; Scobbie, James M.

doi:10.5334/labphon.24

Cited by 12 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 45 publications

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“…She suggests that /l/-darkening following schwa results from gestural separation between the /l/ and the stressed vowel making the /l/ gesture align more with the preceding vowel when there is a schwa. Strycharczuk and Scobbie (2017) found that /l/ after /ʊ/ was likely darker and showed less morphological conditioning than /l/ following /u/. This is also consistent with darkening for a more centralized vowel.…”

Section: Effect Of Vowel Contextsupporting

confidence: 72%

“…Overall, our results provide evidence for both initial lightening and final darkening, and the apparent lack of one or the other effect when reduced/unreduced vowels follow may simply be a power issue arising when independent factors make darkening or lightening harder to detect. The proposal that both /l/-lightening and /l/-darkening are present and conditioned by morphological boundaries differs from previous reports in the literature, most of which argues for /l/-darkening triggered by some combination of syllabification (e.g., Yuan & Liberman, 2011a), morphological constituency (e.g., Strycharczuk & Scobbie, 2017), and rhyme duration (e.g., Sproat & Fujimura, 1993;although, see Recasens, 2012, who proposes a process of /l/-lightening in American English).…”

Section: Summary and Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 55%

“…First, a number of factors which affect the realization of /l/ are not independent. In addition to syllable structure, previous literature has identified morphological constituency (e.g., Lee-Kim et al, 2013;Strycharczuk & Scobbie, 2017), duration (e.g., Sproat & Fujimura, 1993), stress (e.g., Jensen, 2000), and segmental context (e.g., Giles & Moll, 1975) as playing a role in /l/ darkness. But these factors are confounded in various ways.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

North American /l/ both darkens and lightens depending on morphological constituency and segmental context

Mackenzie

Olson

Clayards

et al. 2018

Laboratory Phonology: Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology

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It is uncontroversial that, in many varieties of English, the realization of /l/ varies depending on whether /l/ occurs word-initially or word-finally. The nature of this effect, however, remains controversial. Previous analyses alternately analyzed the variation as darkening or lightening, and alternately found evidence that the variation involves a categorical distinction between allophones or a gradient scale conditioned by phonetic factors. We argue that these diverging conclusions are a result of the numerous factors influencing /l/ darkness and differences between studies in terms of which factors are considered. By controlling for a range of factors, our study demonstrates a pattern of variability that has not been shown in previous work. We find evidence of morpheme-final darkening and morpheme-initial lightening when compared to a baseline of morpheme-internal /l/. We also find segmental effects such that, in segmental contexts which independently darken /l/, one can observe /l/ lightening, and contexts which independently lighten /l/ can make lightening effects undetectable. Morphological and prosodic effects are hence sometimes trumped by segmental context. Once contextual effects are controlled for, there is evidence both for morphologically-conditioned /l/-darkening and for morphologicallyconditioned /l/-lightening, both of which can be understood as a result of prosodic differences reflecting morphological junctures.

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Section: Effect Of Vowel Contextsupporting

confidence: 72%

Section: Summary and Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 55%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

North American /l/ both darkens and lightens depending on morphological constituency and segmental context

Mackenzie

Olson

Clayards

et al. 2018

Laboratory Phonology: Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology

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“…The result of each PCA is a 50-dimensional vector representing each ultrasound and video frame. Following Hoole & Pouplier (2017) and Strycharczuk & Scobbie (2017), we performed Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) of the PCA output in order to quantify the articulatory similarity of coarticulated or assimilated consonants to word-initial /ɹ/, representing the local coarticulation source, and word-initial postalveolar consonants /ʃ tʃ dʒ/, which they may be more likely to resemble in a phonologized assimilation pattern. LDA models of pixel intensities in ultrasound and lip video images were generated for prevocalic /ɹ/ vs. all other phones and for /ʃ tʃ dʒ/ vs. all other phones, and were used to examine the similarity between target sounds and these reference sounds.…”

Section: Articulatory Analysis Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sound change and coarticulatory variability involving English /ɹ/

Smith

Mielke

Magloughlin

et al. 2019

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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is known to exhibit covert variability, with tongue postures ranging from bunched to retroflex, as well as various degrees of lip protrusion and compression. Because of its articulatory variability, /ɹ/ is often a focal point for investigating the role of individual variation in change. In the studies reported here, we examine the coarticulatory effects of alveolar obstruents with /ɹ/, presenting data from a collection of sociolinguistic interviews involving 162 English speakers from Raleigh, North Carolina, and a pilot corpus of ultrasound and lip video from 29 additional talkers. These studies reveal a mixture of assimilatory and coarticulatory patterns. For the sound changes in progress (/tɹ/ and /dɹ/ affrication, and /stɹ/ retraction), we find increases over apparent time, but no effect of covert variability in our laboratory data, consisting mostly of younger talkers. When a sound change has already become phonologized to a new phonemic target with a correspondingly different articulatory target, the original variability is obscured. In comparison, post-lexical coarticulation of word-final /s z/ before a word-initial /ɹ/ more closely resembles /s z/ in tongue posture, with an effect of anticipatory lip-rounding that introduces a low-mid frequency spectral peak during the sibilant interval, and greater reduction in the frequency of this peak for talkers who transition more rapidly to the /ɹ/. In order to uncover the role of covert variability in a sound change, we must look to sounds that exhibit synchronically stable articulatory variability.

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“…Since this would be an example of the phonetics displaying sensitivity to the morphological relationships that exist between words, it again poses a challenge to the modularity of the phonetics-phonology interface. Strycharczuk & Scobbie (2017) favour an Exemplar Theoretic explanation for this phenomenon. According to Exemplar Theory, the lexicon is rich in phonetic detail.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Vowel Nasalisation in Scottish Gaelic: The Search for Paradigm Uniformity Effects in Fine-Grained Phonetic Detail

Morrison

2018

AMP

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According to the modular feedforward architecture of grammar, the phonetics is sensitive only to the output of the phonology and is thus blind to morphological or lexical conditioning (Pierrehumbert 2002). However, this prediction is challenged by claims that fine-grained phonetic detail may display paradigm uniformity (PU) effects (Steriade 2000). In the present study I search for phonetic PU effects in vowel nasalisation in Scottish Gaelic by investigating alternating items in which a nasalising environment is removed by a morpho(phono)logical process known as lenition, which replaces initial [m] with [v] under certain morphosyntactic conditions.In vowels following initial [m], a clear distinction is found between (i) categorical phonological nasalisation, which may be subject to lexically conditioned blocking and which displays overapplication in lenited forms, and (ii) gradient phonetic nasalisation, which applies in those items where categorical phonological nasalisation fails to occur and which disappears completely in lenited forms. The differing patterns displayed by these two types of nasalisation fit neatly with the predictions of a modular architecture, in which categorical phonology has direct access to morphological information but gradient phonetics does not, and I conclude that non-modular architectures such as Exemplar Theory are not the correct explanation for putative PU effects.

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Whence the fuzziness? Morphological effects in interacting sound changes in Southern British English

Cited by 12 publications

References 45 publications

North American /l/ both darkens and lightens depending on morphological constituency and segmental context

North American /l/ both darkens and lightens depending on morphological constituency and segmental context

Sound change and coarticulatory variability involving English /ɹ/

Vowel Nasalisation in Scottish Gaelic: The Search for Paradigm Uniformity Effects in Fine-Grained Phonetic Detail

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