<OT> New Posting: ROA-560

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ROA 560-1102

Perception of gestural overlap and self-organizing phonological contrasts

Alexei Kochetov <kochetov@haskins.yale.edu>

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=560


Abstract:
Languages that maintain distinctive secondary 
articulation contrasts tend to avoid multiple vowel 
contrasts, particularly rounding contrasts in front and 
back vowels. At the same time, languages with complex 
vowel inventories very rarely show distinctions in 
secondary consonant articulations, for example, in 
palatalization or labialization. These observations are 
based both on an analysis of the UPSID Database 
(Maddieson & Precoda 1990) and on an examination of 
inventories of a number of languages of Europe that 
exhibit at least one of the above mentioned contrasts. 


In this paper I provide an explanatory account of these 
co-occurrence restrictions on seemingly unrelated 
segments and derive the two mutually exclusive patterns 
through a learning simulation – an acquisition of a 
hypothetical language with excessively marked segment 
inventory (4 high vowels differentiated by backness 
and/or rounding and 4 consonants with secondary 
articulations corresponding to the vowels). I 
demonstrate that the observed markedness effects emerge 
naturally from low-level interactions between a speaker 
and a listener/learner as a result of limits on what 
can be successfully transmitted through the speech 
communication channel. The key factor in the process is 
the failure on the part of the listener to correctly 
process overlapped gestures (Browman & Goldstein 1989) 
that happen to share the same articulator.


The results suggest that no “innate” restrictions 
against having both types of contrasts in inventories 
need to be assumed (cf., de Boer 2000): A language 
having these contrasts will inevitably “self-organize” 
by shifting to a more stable pattern: with either 
rounding contrasts in the vowels, or secondary 
articulation contrasts in the consonants, or none of 
these marked contrasts.

Keywords: markedness, UG, self-organization, contrast, vowels, secondary
articulation

Areas: Phonology, Phonetics

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=560