The relationship between coarticulation, prosodic weakening, and sound change
Final Report Abstract
In this project we have investigated the production and perception of items that were designed to reflect well-documented sound changes.We showed that the emergence of Umlaut is likely to be linked to diminished compensation for transconsonantal V2-on-V1 coarticulatory effects although in production stress mainly affected undershoot but not coarticulation patterns. We demonstrated that a similar mechanism may also account for polysyllabic shortening at a higher prosodic level, the sentence accent. Further findings indicate that deaccentuation can cause perceptual lenition which may in turn be related to the spread of lenition in many German varieties. The dissertation by Peters (2015) again has provided tentative evidence for perceptual compensation of cluster-induced vowel shortening and perhaps more importantly insights into the different effects of prosodic weakening at the sentence level on gestural timing. This set of studies provide for the first time evidence in the laboratory for the frequently postulated effects of prosodic weakening on sound change. They also present and develop further the role of the production/perception-link at the individual level. The combined results from these studies, however, also demonstrate that these effects are very subtle and that listeners are usually greatly sensitive to the effects of coarticulation and compensate for them. This again is in line with the observation that despite the great amount of synchronic variability diachronic change only very rarely comes into existence.
Publications
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(2012). Compensation for coarticulation in lexically unstressed syllables. 13th Conference on Laboratory Phonology, Stuttgart, Germany
Kleber, F., Harrington, J., Reubold, U., Siddins, J.
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(2012). Compensation for coarticulation in prosodically weak words. Proc. 6th Speech Prosody Conference, Shanghai, China
Kleber, F, Harrington, J., Reubold, U., Siddins, J.
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(2013). Compensatory vowel shortening before complex coda clusters in the production and perception of German monosyllables. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 134, 4202
Peters, S., Kleber, F.
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(2013). The effect of prosodic weakening on the production and perception of trans-consonantal vowel coarticulation in German. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 134, 551–561
Harrington, J., Kleber, F., Reubold, U.
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(2013). The influence of accentuation and polysyllabicity on compensatory shortening in German. Proc. 14th Interspeech Conference, Lyon, France
Siddins, J., Harrington, J., Kleber, F., Reubold, U.
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(2014). Investigating the relationship between accentuation, vowel tensity and compensatory shortening. Proc. 7th Speech Prosody Conference, Dublin, Ireland
Siddins, J., Harrington, J., Reubold, U., Kleber, F.
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(2014). Partielle Neutralisierung des Stimmhaftigkeitskontrastes in zwei Varietäten des Deutschen. In: T. Krefeld, E. Pustka (Eds.), Perzeptive Linguistik: Phonetik, Semantik, Varietäten (pp. 19-32). Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. (Beiheft der Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik ; 157)
Kleber, F.
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(2014). The influence of accentuation and onset complexity on gestural timing within syllables. Proc. 7th Speech Prosody Conference, Dublin, Ireland
Peters, S., Kleber, F.
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(2014). Vowel Coarticulation and Undershoot in Prosodically Weakened Positions. Proc. International Seminar on Speech Production, Cologne, Germany
Cunha, C., Harrington, J., Reubold, U.
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(2015) The implications for sound change of prosodic weakening: evidence from polysyllabic shortening. Journal of Laboratory Phonology 6, 81-117
Harrington, J., Kleber, F., and Reubold, U., Siddins, J.
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(2015). The effects of syllable structure on consonantal timing and vowel compression in child and adult speakers of German. PhD dissertation, LMU München
Peters, S.
