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A Production Study on Phonologization of
/u/-fronting in Alveolar Context KATAOKA, Reiko
(kataoka_at_berkeley.edu)Department of Linguistics,
University of California at Berkeley, 1203
Dwinelle Hall, Berkeley, California 94720-2650
Acoustic Analysis
Results
Introduction
Results (cont.)

• A. Realization of /u/ in /DuD/, /bud/, and
  /hud/ (and Reference vowels)
• Phonetic realization of /u/ are similar in /bud/
  and /hud/.
• Realization of /u/ in /DuD/ are distinctly
  fronted (blue oval) (Figure 4).
• Figure 4. Scatter plots for NF1 and NF2 for
  medium speech rate tokens. For Test words, each
  data point shows mean of five test words (dude,
  zoos, noon, toot, Seus). (n31)

• A. F1 and F2 measurements from Reference vowels
• Figure 1. A sample waveform and spectrogram of
  Thats a whod again, highlighting the vowel
  u.
• For all reference vowels, F1 and F2 were measured
  at the temporal midpoint (red line) of the voiced
  portion of the vowel (Figure 1).
• 2) Then median F1 and F2 values were calculated
  for the six tokens for each vowel category (i,
  ?, ?, æ, ?, ?, ?, u) for each
  speaker.
• F1 and F2 measurements from Test and Control
  vowels

• NF2 as a function of segment duration
• NF2 of /u/ in /bud/ remain the same across
  different segment duration.
• NF2 of /u/ in /hud/ and /DuD/ increases
  (decreases in decimal scale in Hz) as segment
  duration increases.
• NF2 of /u/ in /DuD/ have markedly different
  distribution, and the regression line for this
  data group does not cross the regression line for
  /bud/ data group.
• Regression lines for the /hvd/ and /DuD/ data are
  nearly parallel (Figure 7).

Recently many researchers model sound change as
the result of phonologization (Hyman 1976), a
process whereby coarticulatory perturbation of a
speech sound becomes intended properties of the
sound. Although phonologization is a useful
concept in that it emphasizes the cognitive role
in sound change, that a contexually predictable
feature becomes dissociate from its contexts
(Ohala, 1981), diagnostic criteria for
determining whether phonologization has or has
not occurred when the context itself is still
present have yet to be proposed. This paper
demonstrates how production data of various
speech rates may be used to differentiate
phonologized speech variations from mechanically
caused variations. The case in point is
/u/-fronting in alveolar contexts in American
English, e.g., dude (/dud/) being pronounced as
d?d. On the one hand, the alveolar environment
would be expected to raise the 2nd formant of the
vowel, thus leading to the vowel being fronted
but is the extent of this fronting purely
phonetic or could it have become phonological?
Context /hid/ /hud/ /h?d/ /h?d/ /h?d/ /h?d/
/hæd/ /bud/ /h?t/ /DuD/ Type Control
/bud/ Ref /hVd/ Test /DuD/
Background Previous Studies on Coarticulatory
Variations

• Lindblom (1963) Vowel reduction in Swedish CVC
  sequences
• Found Reduced undershoot as segment duration
  increases
• Undershoot is due to automatic coarticulation
  (i.e., phonetic).
• Invariant vowel target articulation
• Solé (1992) Vowel nasalization in American
  English and Spanish
• Found Constant duration for nasalization in
  Spanish vs. variable duration as a function of
  segmental duration in English
• In Spanish nasalization is purely phonetic
• In American English nasalization is phonologized
• Phonological features resist durational
  manipulation.
• Phonetic coarticulation disappears if there is
  enough time for the articulator to reach its
  target position.

Discussion

• The results from the production data obtained
  from 31 speakers indicate that the high back
  vowels had considerably higher F2 values
  following alveolar consonants than bilabial or no
  consonants (the phonetic realization of /h/ is a
  voiceless copy of the following vowel). The
  difference does not go away when segment duration
  increases (up to 300 ms). This suggests that
  speakers have distinct production goals for /u/s
  in alveolar contexts that is, /u/-fronting in
  this context has been phonologized in American
  English.
• The near parallel regression lines for the /DuD/
  and /hud/ data further reinforce the idea of
  separate articulatory goals for vowels in
  different contexts.
• For /u/ in /bud/, NF2 values remains the same
  across speech rates. This seems to reflect the
  fact that the onset /b/ and the vowel /u/ share
  the same articulation and thus the lowest F2 is
  not affected by the degree of overlapping of
  adjacent articulations.
• The results of this study seem to suggest that
  language users have many more distinctive sound
  categories than traditionally assumed. Further,
  coarticulation may be better understood as
  categorical phenomena than gradient phenomena.
  Even if it starts out as gradient effect, by
  using the same articulatory sequence again and
  again, language learners might inevitably develop
  stable categorical sequencial articulatory goals.
  

Mean duration (pooled) Fast 113.7 ms
Medium 151.6 ms Slow 215.7 ms
Materials and Methods
Following Lindblom (1963) and Solé (1992), the
question of whether /u/-fronting is phonetic or
phonological was investigated by production
experiment, where speakers were asked to produce
various words and non-words of a /C1VC2/ form in
carrier sentences, where the place of C2 was
fixed to alveolar and the place of C1 varied
among alveolar (e.g. /dud/), bilabial (e.g.,
/bud/) and no place (i.e., /hud/), in slow,
medium, and fast speech rate. Data collection
UC Berkeley, Phonology Lab Participants
Native speakers of American English 31
talkers (5 M, 10F 19-45 yrs old) Carrier
Sentence Thats a _____ again. Production
List (each word was repeated 6 times) Reference
hvd (medium rate) Test dvd (fast, slow,
medium rate) hed i dude dud hid ? zo
os zuz head ? noon nun had æ too
t tut hot ? Seus sus
(53690 tokens) HUD ? hood ? Control
cvc (fast, slow, medium rate) whod u
(8648 tokens) booed bud
whod hud (23636 tokens)
Total 174 tokens/speaker elicited
(ln)
vowel i u ? ?
? ? æ ?
ln(F1) 5.89 ln(F2) 8.02 NF1 0.51 NF2
-0.42
m_ln(F1) 6.4 m_ln(F2) 7.6
Bibliography
(ln)
Hyman, L. (1976). Phonologization, In
Linguistic studies presented to Joseph H.
Greenberg, edited by A. Juilland (Saratoga), pp.
407-418. Lindblom, B., and Studdert-Kennedy, M.
(1967). On the role of formant transitions in
vowel recognition, J. Acoust Soc. Am. 42,
830-843. Nearey, T. (1978). Phonetic Feature
Systems for Vowels. Indiana. Indiana University
Linguistics Club. Ohala, J. J. (1981). The
listener as a source of sound change, in Papers
from Parasession on Language and Behavior,
edited by C. S. Masek, R. A. Hendrick, and M. F.
Miller (Chicago Linguistic Society, Chicago), pp.
178-203. Solé, M. J. (1992). Phonetic and
phonological processes the case
of nasalization, Language and Speech 35, 2943.