| ROA: | 469 |
|---|---|
| Title: | Production, perception, and emergent phonotactic patterns: A case of contrastive palatalization |
| Authors: | Alexei Kochetov |
| Comment: | |
| Length: | 385 |
| Abstract: | The goal of this thesis is to answer two related questions: (i) to what extent can limitations of human speech production and perception explain cross-linguistic positional markedness asymmetries? and (ii) is it logically necessary to attribute these scales to Universal Grammar, as is commonly assumed (e.g., Prince & Smolensky 1993)? In order to answer these questions, a case study involving the distribution of the plain-palatalized contrast in labial and coronal stops was carried out. A typological survey of languages with contrastive palatalization shows that the distinction between plain and palatalized segments is most often maintained in the syllable onset position and most commonly neutralized in the preconsonantal coda environment. Palatalized labials are more susceptible to neutralization than the palatalized coronals. The most common outcome of neutralization is a plain segment. In a number of articulatory, acoustic, and perceptual experiments I investigate Russian plain and palatalized stops in cross word-boundary sequences. The articulatory study reveals that the environments that generally induce neutralization exhibit the most variability in the magnitude and timing of the tongue body gesture, the articulatory correlate of the plain-palatalized contrast. They also show that that the effect of environment is different for palatalized labial and coronals. In addition, the variable overlap of primary gestures has important acoustic consequences: it results in the lack of acoustic release burst of the first consonant and less distinct vocalic transitions. The perceptual findings from both native and non-native subjects under several conditions demonstrate that listeners reliably distinguish the contrast in the contexts when the respective gestures are stable (as in syllable onset), and fail to hear it in the environments that induce gestural variability (syllable coda, especially before consonants). The results of perception, taken as derived scales, serve as input to a hypothetical learner constructing language-particular grammars. Crucially, the learner is not equipped with positional markedness scales. Limitations on what can or cannot be recovered severely restrict the learning path, ultimately resulting in a limited set of possible grammars that correspond to the attested cross-linguistic patterns of contrastive palatalization. |
| Type: | Dissertation |
| Area/Keywords: | Phonology,Phonetics |
| Article: | This article has been withdrawn. |