Element contents
Series: Elements in Phonology
Coarticulation in Phonology
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 July 2022
Summary
There is debate about how coarticulation is represented in speakers' mental grammar, as well as the role that coarticulation plays in explaining synchronic and diachronic sound patterns across languages. This Element takes an individual-differences approach in examining nasal coarticulation in production and perception in order to understand how coarticulation is used phonologically in American English. Experiment 1 examines coarticulatory variation across 60 speakers. The relationship between speaking rate and coarticulation is used to classify three types of coarticulation. Experiment 2 is a perception study relating the differences in realization of coarticulation across speakers to listeners' identification of lexical items. The author demonstrates that differences in speaker-specific patterns of coarticulation reflect differences in the phonologization of vowel nasalization. Results support predictions made by models that propose an active role by both speakers and listeners in using coarticulatory variation to express lexical contrasts and view coarticulation as represented in an individual's grammar.
- Type
- Element
- Information
- Series: Elements in PhonologyOnline ISBN: 9781009082488Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication: 04 August 2022
References
Ali, L., Gallagher, T., Goldstein, J., & Daniloff, R. (1971). Perception of coarticulated nasality. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 49(2B), 538–540.Google Scholar
Avelino, H., Zariquiey, R., & Pérez-Silva, J. I. (2020). Nasal coarticulation and prosody in Kakataibo. Phonetica, 77(1), 29–54.Google Scholar
Baese-Berk, M., & Goldrick, M. (2009). Mechanisms of interaction in speech production. Language and Cognitive Processes, 24(4), 527–554.Google Scholar
Baker, A., Archangeli, D., & Mielke, J. (2011). Variability in American English s-retraction suggests a solution to the actuation problem. Language Variation and Change, 23(3), 347–374.Google Scholar
Bates, D., Maechler, M., Bolker, B., Walker, S., Bojesen Christensen, R. H., & Singmann, H. (2016). Lme4: Linear mixed-effects models using Eigen and S4. R package version 1.0–6. 2014.Google Scholar
Beddor, P. S. (1993). The perception of nasal vowels. In Huffman, M. K. and Krakow, R. A., eds., Nasals, Nasalization, and the Velum. New York: Academic Press, pp. 171–196.Google Scholar
Beddor, P. S. (2007). Nasals and nasalization: The relation between segmental and coarticulatory timing. In Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2007), pp. 249–254.Google Scholar
Beddor, P. S. (2009). A coarticulatory path to sound change. Language, 85(4), 785–821.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beddor, P. S. (2015). The relation between language users’ perception and production repertoires. In Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2015), pp. 1–9.Google Scholar
Beddor, P. S., & Krakow, R. A. (1999). Perception of coarticulatory nasalization by speakers of English and Thai: Evidence for partial compensation. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 106(5), 2868–2887.Google Scholar
Beddor, P. S., Harnsberger, J. D., & Lindemann, S. (2002). Language-specific patterns of vowel-to-vowel coarticulation: Acoustic structures and their perceptual correlates. Journal of Phonetics, 30(4), 591–627.Google Scholar
Beddor, P. S., McGowan, K. B., Boland, J. E., Coetzee, A. W., & Brasher, A. (2013). The time course of perception of coarticulation. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 133(4), 2350–2366.Google Scholar
Blevins, J. (2004). Evolutionary Phonology: The Emergence of Sound Patterns. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Blevins, J. (2015). Evolutionary phonology: A holistic approach to sound change typology. In Honeybone, P. and Salmons, J., eds., The Oxford Handbook of Historical Phonology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 485–500.Google Scholar
Boberg, C., & Strassel, S. M. (2000). Short-a in Cincinnati: A change in progress. Journal of English Linguistics, 28(2), 108–126.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bradlow, A. R., & Bent, T. (2002). The clear speech effect for non-native listeners. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 112(1), 272–284.Google Scholar
Bradlow, A. R., Kraus, N., & Hayes, E. (2003). Speaking clearly for children with learning disabilities: Sentence perception in noise. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 46(1), 80–97.Google Scholar
Brotherton, C., Cohn, M., Zellou, G., & Barreda, S. (2019). Sub-regional variation in positioning and degree of nasalization of /æ/ allophones in California. In Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2019), pp. 2373–2377.Google Scholar
Busà, M. G. (2007). Coarticulatory nasalization and phonological developments: Data from Italian and English nasal-fricative sequences. In Solé, M.-J., Beddor, P. S., and Ohala, J. J., eds., Experimental Approaches to Phonology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 155–174.Google Scholar
Calamai, S., & Celata, C. (2018). Velar nasals in sound change. On the phonetic origin of Florentine anaphonesis. In Recasens, D and Sánchez-Miret, F, eds., Production and Perception Mechanisms in Sound Change. Berlin: Lincom Europa, pp. 39–54.Google Scholar
Carignan, C. (2014). An acoustic and articulatory examination of the “oral” in “nasal”: The oral articulations of French nasal vowels are not arbitrary. Journal of Phonetics, 46, 23–33.Google Scholar
Carignan, C. (2017). Covariation of nasalization, tongue height, and breathiness in the realization of F1 of Southern French nasal vowels. Journal of Phonetics, 63, 87–105.Google Scholar
Carignan, C., Shosted, R., Shih, C., & Rong, P. (2011). Compensatory articulation in American English nasalized vowels. Journal of Phonetics, 39(4), 668–682.Google Scholar
Chen, M. Y. (1997). Acoustic correlates of English and French nasalized vowels. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 102(4), 2360–2370.Google Scholar
Chen, M. Y., & Wang, W. (1975). Sound change: Actuation and implementation. Language, 51(2), 255–281.Google Scholar
Cho, T., & Ladefoged, P. (1999). Variation and universals in VOT: Evidence from 18 languages. Journal of Phonetics, 27(2), 207–229.Google Scholar
Cho, T., Kim, D., & Kim, S. (2017). Prosodically-conditioned fine-tuning of coarticulatory vowel nasalization in English. Journal of Phonetics, 64, 71–89.Google Scholar
Chomsky, N., & Halle, M. (1968). The Sound Pattern of English. New York: Harper & Row.Google Scholar
Clayards, M., Tanenhaus, M. K., Aslin, R. N., & Jacobs, R. A. (2008). Perception of speech reflects optimal use of probabilistic speech cues. Cognition, 108(3), 804–809.Google Scholar
Cohn, A. C. (1990). Phonetic and phonological rules of nasalization. Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles.Google Scholar
Cohn, A. C., & Renwick, M. E. (2021). Embracing multidimensionality in phonological analysis. The Linguistic Review, 38(1), 101–139.Google Scholar
De Jong, K. J. (1995). The supraglottal articulation of prominence in English: Linguistic stress as localized hyperarticulation. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 97(1), 491–504.Google Scholar
De Jong, K. (2004). Stress, lexical focus, and segmental focus in English: Patterns of variation in vowel duration. Journal of Phonetics, 32(4), 493–516.Google Scholar
De Jong, N. H., Wempe, T., Quené, H., and Persoon, I. (2017). Praat Script Speech Rate V2. https://sites.google.com/site/speechrate/Home/praat-script-syllable-nuclei-v2.Google Scholar
Delvaux, V., Demolin, D., Harmegnies, B., & Soquet, A. (2008). The aerodynamics of nasalization in French. Journal of Phonetics, 36(4), 578–606.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Demolin, D. (2007). Coarticulatory timing and aerodynamics of nasals and nasalization. In Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2007), pp. 271–274.Google Scholar
Farnetani, E. (1990). VCV lingual coarticulation and its spatiotemporal domain. In Hardcastle, W. J. and Marchal, A., eds., Speech Production and Speech Modelling. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 93–130.Google Scholar
Fowler, C. A. (2005). Parsing coarticulated speech in perception: Effects of coarticulation resistance. Journal of Phonetics, 33(2), 199–213.Google Scholar
Garellek, M., Ritchart, A., & Kuang, J. (2016). Breathy voice during nasality: A cross-linguistic study. Journal of Phonetics, 59, 110–121.Google Scholar
Hajek, J. (1997). Universals of Sound Change in Nasalization, vol. 31. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Hajek, J. (2013). Vowel nasalization. In Dryer, M. and Haspelmath, M., eds., The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. http://wals.info/chapter/10, accessed on May 30, 2021.Google Scholar
Hajek, J., & Maeda, S. (2000). Investigating universals of sound change: The effect of vowel height and duration on the development of distinctive nasalization. Papers in Laboratory Phonology V: Acquisition and the Lexicon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 52–69.Google Scholar
Harrington, J., Kleber, F., & Reubold, U. (2013). The effect of prosodic weakening on the production and perception of trans-consonantal vowel coarticulation in German. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 134(1), 551–561.Google Scholar
Huffman, M. K. 1988. Timing of contextual nasalization in two languages. UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics, 69, 68–76.Google Scholar
Jackobson, R., Fant, G., & Halle, M. (1952). Preliminaries to Speech Analysis: The Distinctive Features. Cambridge: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Jang, J., Kim, S., & Cho, T. (2018). Focus and boundary effects on coarticulatory vowel nasalization in Korean with implications for cross-linguistic similarities and differences. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 144(1), EL33–EL39.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kawasaki, H. (1986). Phonetic explanation for phonological universals: The case of distinctive vowel nasalization. In Ohala, J. J. and Jaeger, J. J., eds., Experimental Phonology. New York: Academic Press, pp. 81–103.Google Scholar
Keating, P. A., & Cohn, A. C. (1988). Cross‐language effects of vowels on consonant onsets. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 84(S1), S84–S84.Google Scholar
Kenstowicz, M., & Kisseberth, C. (2014). Generative Phonology: Description and Theory. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Kleinschmidt, D. F., & Jaeger, T. F. (2015). Robust speech perception: Recognize the familiar, generalize to the similar, and adapt to the novel. Psychological Review, 122(2), 148–203.Google Scholar
Krakow, R. A., & Beddor, P. S. (1991). Coarticulation and the perception of nasality. In Proceedings of the 12th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 1991), pp. 38–41.Google Scholar
Krakow, R. A., Beddor, P. S., Goldstein, L. M., & Fowler, C. A. (1988). Coarticulatory influences on the perceived height of nasal vowels. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 83(3), 1146–1158.Google Scholar
Kraljic, T., & Samuel, A. G. (2006). Generalization in perceptual learning for speech. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 13(2), 262–268.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kuznetsova, A., Brockhoff, P. B., & Christensen, R. H. (2017). lmerTest package: Tests in linear mixed effects models. Journal of Statistical Software, 82(13), 1–26.Google Scholar
Ladefoged, P. (1971). Preliminaries to Linguistic Phonetics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Lahiri, A., & Marslen-Wilson, W. (1991). The mental representation of lexical form: A phonological approach to the recognition lexicon. Cognition, 38(3), 245–294.Google Scholar
Lindblom, B. (1990). Explaining phonetic variation: A sketch of the H&H theory. In Hardcastle, W. J. and Marchal, A., eds., Speech Production and Speech Modelling. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 403–439.Google Scholar
Lindblom, B., Guion, S., Hura, S., Moon, S. J., & Willerman, R. (1995). Is sound change adaptive?. Rivista di Linguistica, 7, 5–36.Google Scholar
Maddieson, I. (2013). Absence of Common Consonants. In Dryer, M. and Haspelmath, M., eds., The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. http://wals.info/chapter/18, accessed on May 30, 2021.Google Scholar
Manuel, S. Y. (1990). The role of contrast in limiting vowel‐to‐vowel coarticulation in different languages. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 88(3), 1286–1298.Google Scholar
Manuel, S. (1999). Cross-language studies: Relating language-particular coarticulation patterns to other language-particular facts. In Hardcastle, W. J. and Hewlett, N., eds., Coarticulation: Theory, Data and Techniques. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 179–198.Google Scholar
Manuel, S. Y., & Krakow, R. A. (1984). Universal and language particular aspects of vowel-to-vowel coarticulation. Haskins Laboratories Status Report on Speech Research, 77(78), 69–78.Google Scholar
Matisoff, J. A. (1975). Rhinoglottophilia: The mysterious connection between nasality and glottality. In Ferguson, C. A., Hyman, L. M., and Ohala, J. J., eds., Nasálfest: Papers from a Symposium on Nasals and Nasalization. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Language Universals Project, pp. 265–287.Google Scholar
McMurray, B., & Jongman, A. (2011). What information is necessary for speech categorization? Harnessing variability in the speech signal by integrating cues computed relative to expectations. Psychological Review, 118(2), 219–246.Google Scholar
McMurray, B., Tanenhaus, M. K., & Aslin, R. N. (2002). Gradient effects of within-category phonetic variation on lexical access. Cognition, 86(2), B33–B42.Google Scholar
Merrifield, W. R. (1963). Palantla Chinantec syllable types. Anthropological Linguistics, 1–16.Google Scholar
Merrifield, W. R., & Edmondson, J. A. (1999). Palantla Chinantec: Phonetic experiments on nasalization, stress, and tone. International Journal of American Linguistics, 65(3), 303–323.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miller, J. L., & Volaitis, L. E. (1989). Effect of speaking rate on the perceptual structure of a phonetic category. Perception & Psychophysics, 46(6), 505–512.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Moon, S. J., & Lindblom, B. (1994). Interaction between duration, context, and speaking style in English stressed vowels. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 96(1), 40–55.Google Scholar
Montagu, J., & Amelot, A. (2005). Comparaison des apports de différentes méthodes d’enregistrement de la nasalité. In Rencontre Jeunes Chercheurs. Toulouse: Université Paul Sabatier, pp. 17–21.Google Scholar
Munson, B., & Solomon, N. P. (2004). The effect of phonological neighborhood density on vowel articulation. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 47(5), 1048–1058.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ohala, J. J. (1974). Experimental historical phonology. In Anderson, J. M. and Jones, C., eds., Historical Linguistics, vol. 2. Amsterdam: North-Holland, pp. 353–389.Google Scholar
Ohala, J. J. (1975). Phonetic explanations for nasal sound patterns. In Ferguson, C. A., Hyman, L. M., and Ohala, J. J., eds., Nasálfest: Papers from a Symposium on Nasals and Nasalization. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Language Universals Project, pp. 289–316.Google Scholar
Ohala, J. J. (1993). Coarticulation and phonology. Language and Speech, 36(2–3), 155–170.Google Scholar
Ohala, J. J., & Ohala, M. (1995). Speech perception and lexical representation: The role of vowel nasalization in Hindi and English. In Connell, B. and Arvaniti, A., eds., Phonology and Phonetic Evidence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 41–60.Google Scholar
Picheny, M. A., Durlach, N. I., & Braida, L. D. (1985). Speaking clearly for the hard of hearing I: Intelligibility differences between clear and conversational speech. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 28(1), 96–103.Google Scholar
Pierrehumbert, J. B. 2002. Word-specific phonetics. In Gussenhoven, C. and Warner, N., eds., Laboratory phonology VII. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 101–140.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pierrehumbert, J. B. (2016). Phonological representation: Beyond abstract versus episodic. Annual Review of Linguistics, 2, 33–52.Google Scholar
Rosenfelder, I., Fruehwald, J., Evanini, K., & Yuan, J. (2011). FAVE (forced alignment and vowel extraction) program suite.Google Scholar
Ruhlen, M. (1978). Nasal vowels. In Greenberg, J. H., ed., Universals of Human Language. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 1–36.Google Scholar
Sampson, R. (1999). Nasal vowel evolution in Romance. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Scarborough, R. A. (2004). Coarticulation and the structure of the lexicon. Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles.Google Scholar
Scarborough, R. (2012). Lexical similarity and speech production: Neighborhoods for nonwords. Lingua, 122(2), 164–176.Google Scholar
Scarborough, R. (2013). Neighborhood-conditioned patterns in phonetic detail: Relating coarticulation and hyperarticulation. Journal of Phonetics, 41(6), 491–508.Google Scholar
Scarborough, R., & Zellou, G. (2013). Clarity in communication: “Clear” speech authenticity and lexical neighborhood density effects in speech production and perception. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 134(5), 3793–3807.Google Scholar
Scarborough, R., Zellou, G., Mirzayan, A., & Rood, D. S. (2015). Phonetic and phonological patterns of nasality in Lakota vowels. Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 45(3), 289–309.Google Scholar
Schourup, L. (1973). A cross-language study of vowel nasal coarticulation. Ohio State University Working Papers in Linguistics, 15, 190–221.Google Scholar
Solé, M. J. (1992). Phonetic and phonological processes: The case of nasalization. Language and Speech, 35(1–2), 29–43.Google Scholar
Solé, M. J. (1995). Spatio-temporal patterns of velopharyngeal action in phonetic and phonological nasalization. Language and Speech, 38(1), 1–23.Google Scholar
Solé, M. J. (2007). Controlled and mechanical properties in speech. In Solé, M.-J., Beddor, P. S., and Ohala, J. J., eds., Experimental Approaches to Phonology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 302–321.Google Scholar
Smiljanić, R., & Bradlow, A. R. (2009). Speaking and hearing clearly: Talker and listener factors in speaking style changes. Language and Linguistics Compass, 3(1), 236–264.Google Scholar
Stoakes, H. M., Fletcher, J. M., & Butcher, A. R. (2020). Nasal coarticulation in Bininj Kunwok: An aerodynamic analysis. Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 50(3), 305–332.Google Scholar
Styler, W. (2017). On the acoustical features of vowel nasality in English and French. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 142(4), 2469–2482.Google Scholar
Tamminga, M., & Zellou, G. (2015). Cross-dialectal differences in nasal coarticulation in American English. In Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2015), pp. 1–4.Google Scholar
Tamminga, M., Wilder, R., Lai, W., & Wade, L. (2020). Perceptual learning, talker specificity, and sound change. Papers in Historical Phonology, 5, 90–122.Google Scholar
Toscano, J. C., McMurray, B., Dennhardt, J., & Luck, S. J. (2010). Continuous perception and graded categorization: Electrophysiological evidence for a linear relationship between the acoustic signal and perceptual encoding of speech. Psychological Science, 21(10), 1532–1540.Google Scholar
Warren, P., & Marslen-Wilson, W. (1987). Continuous uptake of acoustic cues in spoken word recognition. Perception & Psychophysics, 41(3), 262–275.Google Scholar
Weinreich, U., Labov, W., & Herzog, M. (1968). Empirical Foundations for a Theory of Language Change. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Wetzels, W. L., & Nevins, A. (2018). Prenasalized and postoralized consonants: The diverse functions of enhancement. Language, 94(4), 834–866.Google Scholar
Wright, J. T. (1986). The behavior of nasalized vowels in the perceptual vowel space. In Ohala, J. J. and Jaeger, J. J., eds., Experimental Phonology. New York: Academic Press, pp 45–67.Google Scholar
Wright, R. (2004). Factors of lexical competition in vowel articulation. Papers in Laboratory Phonology VI, 75–87.Google Scholar
Yu, A. C. (2010). Perceptual compensation is correlated with individuals’ “autistic” traits: Implications for models of sound change. PloS one, 5(8), e11950.Google Scholar
Yu, A. C., & Zellou, G. (2019). Individual differences in language processing: Phonology. Annual Review of Linguistics, 5, 131–150.Google Scholar
Zellou, G. (2017). Individual differences in the production of nasal coarticulation and perceptual compensation. Journal of Phonetics, 61, 13–29.Google Scholar
Zellou, G., & Brotherton, C. (2021). Phonetic imitation of multidimensional acoustic variation of the nasal split short-a system. Speech Communication, 135, 54–65.Google Scholar
Zellou, G., & Dahan, D. (2019). Listeners maintain phonological uncertainty over time and across words: The case of vowel nasality in English. Journal of Phonetics, 76, 100910.Google Scholar
Zellou, G., & Ferenc Segedin, B. (2019). The distribution of coarticulatory variation influences perceptual adaptation. In Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2019), pp. 393–397.Google Scholar
Zellou, G., & Scarborough, R. (2012). Nasal Coarticulation and Contrastive Stress. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, pp. 2686–2689.Google Scholar
Zellou, G., & Scarborough, R. (2015). Lexically conditioned phonetic variation in motherese: age-of-acquisition and other word-specific factors in infant- and adult-directed speech. Laboratory Phonology, 6(3–4), 305–336.Google Scholar
Zellou, G., & Scarborough, R. (2019). Neighborhood-conditioned phonetic enhancement of an allophonic vowel split. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 145(6), 3675–3685.Google Scholar
Zellou, G., & Tamminga, M. (2014). Nasal coarticulation changes over time in Philadelphia English. Journal of Phonetics, 47, 18–35.Google Scholar
Zellou, G., Dahan, D., & Embick, D. (2017). Imitation of coarticulatory vowel nasality across words and time. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 32(6), 776–791.Google Scholar
Zellou, G., Scarborough, R., & Nielsen, K. (2016). Phonetic imitation of coarticulatory vowel nasalization. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 140(5), 3560–3575.Google Scholar
- 8
- Cited by