This work investigates feature co-occurrence trends, with special focus on the phonology of the larynx and its interaction with supralaryngeal articulation. My examination of the phonological behavior and phonetic realization of various features, especially [voi], [spr], [cst], and [son], probes the causes behind a wide range of crosslinguistic trends in segment inventory structure, along with the representation of several sound types including breathy-voiced stops and implosives. The most general insight from the roughly eighty patterns investigated is that their specific content can be plausibly derived from non-cognitive factors. This poses a major duplication problem if the same patterns are attributed to innate cognitive stipulations. I address this problem with a critical review of recent trends in grammar design, arguing for a theory where as much as possible grammatical structure is learned rather than innate and where as much as possible optimization occurs during acquisition rather than during mature speech. After exploring the logical relationships among several major components of existing grammar design theories, I recommend integrating generation with evaluation and configuring grammatical directions in a representational format. I also review research on the interface between linguistics and cognitive science and argue that my proposal is well suited for implementation through distributed, continuous, and highly parallel processing systems. The main feature co-occurrence insights in the earlier chapters also facilitate a reanalysis of one of the oldest unsolved problems in historical linguistics: the evolution of the Indo-European stop series. In the process of developing a novel solution, I show how the use of features can increase the efficiency and comprehensiveness of reconstruction. By highlighting the extent to which feature co-occurrence patterns can be derived from independently evident non-cognitive factors, this work contributes to a growing body of research focused on removing innate/learnable duplication problems. While most of the grammatical details of sound systems seem best removed from the innate endowment, I do not conclude that phonetic content and phonological cognition never interact directly. In each of the three main dimensions of this work – developing phonological profiles of specific sound types, exploring implications for grammar design, and historical problem solving – I find evidence that cognition maintains extensive awareness of the phonetic values of the variables it manipulates.

/pdf/feature-patterns-their-sources-and-status-in-grammar-and-3mt4rcsrmg.pdf

Feature Patterns: Their Sources and Status in Grammar and Reconstruction

This is a study of final poststressed vowel devoicing following /s/ in Brazilian Portuguese. We contradict the literature describing it as deletion by arguing, first, that the vowel is not deleted, but overlapped and devoiced by the /s/, and, second, that gradient reduction with devoicing may lead to apocope diachronically. The following results support our view: (1) partially devoiced vowels are centralized; (2) centralization is inversely proportional to duration; (3) total devoicing is accompanied by lowering of the /s/ centroid; (4) the /s/ noise seems to be lengthened when the vowel is totally devoiced; (5) aerodynamic tests reveal that lengthened /s/ has a final vowel-like portion, too short to be voiced; (6) lengthened /s/ favors vowel recovery in perceptual tests. This seems to be a likely path from reduction to devoicing to listener-based apocope.

From Reduction to Apocope: Final Poststressed Vowel Devoicing in Brazilian Portuguese

Author(s): Faytak, Matthew Donald | Advisor(s): Johnson, Keith A | Abstract: This thesis explores the role of uniformity of speech articulation in shaping phonological systems of contrast and their phonetic implementations The observable effect of uniformity for an individual speaker is that a given phonological primitive (such as a distinctive feature value or gesture, depending on one's theoretical framework) tends to be implemented with maximum articulatory similarity across the speech sounds sharing that primitive Although less discussed than other organizing principles in substance-based phonology such as phonetic dispersion (Liljencrants and Lindblom, 1972), focalization due to quantal effects (Stevens and Keyser, 1989; Schwartz et al, 1997b), or articulatory ease (Martinet, 1955; Lindblom, 1990), uniformity has been observed in a range of the world's languages, mainly in the timing of laryngeal articulations in stop inventories (Keating, 2003; Chodroff and Wilson, 2017) but also in place-of-articulation primitives (Maddieson, 1996; Chodroff, 2017)However, uniformity has typically been formulated as a purely linguistic constraint A primary aim of this dissertation is to motivate uniformity as emerging from domain-general biases that shape complex systems of goal-oriented action more broadly, thereby shedding light on the substantive basis and structure of phonological systems To this end, I describe a model in which articulatory uniformity emerges from articulatory reuse during learning During the language acquisition process, a learner's internal model (mapping the effects of motor controls applied to the speech articulators to their outcomes) is not yet fully developed Under these conditions, a "model-free" learning strategy based on bootstrapping off of the learner's already-mastered skills (exploitation, rather than exploration) may predominate, such that phonological categories whose outputs are perceptually similar may come to be produced with the same articulatory primitivesThis thesis tests aspects of the model of uniformity-through-reuse with an experiment on Sūzhōu Chinese, whose fricative vowels are known to somewhat resemble alveolopalatal fricative consonants in their tongue-palate constriction patterns and fricative noise production targets (Ling, 2009) Ultrasound tongue imaging was used to characterize the typical fricative vowel and alveolopalatal fricative consonant productions of 43 Sūzhōu Chinese speakersAnalysis reveals that most Sūzhōu Chinese speakers typically use a single tongue posture uniformly across the fricative vowels and consonants examined, while a minority of speakers deviate from uniformity to an idiosyncratic extent The extent to which a speaker deviates from a uniform strategy is shown to be unrelated to demographic characteristics and language ability in Sūzhōu Chinese and Standard Chinese This pattern at the population level suggests that "speaker-side" factors, such as articulatory reuse, are primarily responsible for shaping the "synchronic pool of variation" (Ohala, 1989) for this set of Sūzhōu Chinese segments

/pdf/articulatory-uniformity-through-articulatory-reuse-insights-14mgc2b096.pdf

Articulatory uniformity through articulatory reuse: insights from an ultrasound study of Sūzhōu Chinese

UC Berkeley Phonology Lab Annual Report (2014) High vowel fricativization and chain shift Matthew Faytak University of California, Berkeley December 24, 2014 Introduction ∗ Chain shifts are a thoroughly studied phenomenon by which intra-categorical changes occur in several cate- gories in tandem, such that one adjustment appears to drive another. I argue for expanding the typology of chain shifts to include chain shifts that involve the raising of non-high vowels in tandem with the fricativiza- tion of high vowels. I refer to the latter sound change here as high vowel fricativization (HVF), an unusual but sporadically attested change in which a reconstructible rounded or unrounded front vowel becomes a voiced strident coronal fricative (e.g. [i y] → [z z w ]), or a back rounded vowel becomes a voiced labiodental fricative (e.g. [u] → [v ]). HVF is due, in some better-studied cases, to allophonic coarticulation of high vowels with immediately preceding consonantal fricatives (e.g. [si] → [sz ]). However, still other cases of HVF appear to involve the movement of an entire high vowel category to production as a voiced fricative, even in the absence of a potential conditioning environment (e.g. [Oi] → [Oz ]). It is the latter set of vowel fricativizations that interest us here. I posit that HVF is, in these cases, involved as one intra-categorical change in a chain shift of one or more vocalic phonemes: in other words, that it takes part in a raising chain shift (i.e. e → i → z ). To bolster this argument, I examine the attestation of the fricativized vowels in question and reconstruct their associated raising chains in a small but genetically diverse set of languages. I argue from the attested changes that an explanation for HVF lies in the aerodynamics of speech: high vowels, particularly peripheral high vowels, tend to be realized with some turbulent airflow given their narrow aperture, which provides the “seed” for the eventual phonologization of fricative noise as ∗ This paper would not be possible without the contributions of others: thanks go to Larry Hyman and Andrew Garrett for reading my early drafts, and Keith Johnson for his comments on earlier presentations that gradually became sections of this paper. Similar thanks must go to audiences at the 2014 LSA meeting in Minneapolis and Stanford’s P-Interest workshop. I single out Paul Kiparsky, Meagan Sumner, Greg Finley, Katie Franich, and Jack Merrill for their useful feedback in these and other settings. I am also grateful to Bruce Connell, Katya Chirkova, Jeff Good, David Mortensen, and Chris Donlay for references, discussion, or data pertaining to their respective linguistic areas, which have informed my perspective on HVF even if they are not directly referenced in this paper. Some credit also must be given to Sarah Bakst, who lends this paper its unofficial subtitle, “When Push Comes to [Sv ].”

/pdf/high-vowel-fricativization-and-chain-shift-46klv12nm1.pdf

High Vowel Fricativization and Chain Shift

Vowels are thought to play an important role in sub-dialect identification. How they vary among sub-dialects in tonal language has never been examined yet. Acoustic correlates of vowels from three sub-dialects, such as vowel patterns, formant values, formant trajectories, vowel inherent spectral change (VISC), and HNR, were investigated in the present study. The results of this acoustic study confirmed that vowels still played an important role in sub-dialect identification even in tone language. Vowel inherent spectral change showed significant and systematic differences among these sub-dialects, which might prove itself as an important acoustics cue for sub-dialect identification. Frication also can be a feature for vowels to distinguish itself from its variations in other sub-dialects. Tonal variations, however, indeed exist across these sub-dialectal regions. Thus in further studies we would prefer to build models for production and perception with vowels and tones weighted.

Vowels as acoustic cues for sub-dialect identification in Chinese

The present study investigates the acoustic and articulatory characteristics of a Fricative vowel in Suzhou Chinese. The acoustic results show that the fricative vowel has more noise and a lower F2 than its pure vowel counterpart. The articulatory results show that the constriction of fricative vowel locates at a more anterior position than the pure close vowel. The commonly accepted correlation between F1 and vowel height, and F2 and vowel backness does not apply to the fricative vowel in the present study.

/pdf/the-articulatory-and-acoustic-study-of-fricative-vowels-in-3ymmk7pea1.pdf

The articulatory and acoustic study of fricative vowels in suzhou chinese

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The articulatory and acoustic study of fricative vowels in suzhou chinese