The Causal Structure of Intervocalic Lenition

West Virginia University Research Corporation, Morgantown WV

Investigators

Abstract

Linguists typically study the sounds of human languages from two different perspectives: the phonological one, which focuses on their patterns and organization at a symbolic level (e.g., language X has more vowels than language Y) and the phonetic one, which focuses on physical properties, including acoustic characteristics (e.g., intensity) and articulatory movements (e.g., the sound /b/ is produced by closing the lips). An ongoing debate on the realization of consonant sounds is whether the amount of effort speakers make to produce them is represented for different sounds at an abstract level in the mind or is simply explained by the position these consonants occupy in words and sentences. This project sheds light on this matter by analyzing and comparing the acoustic properties of multiple consonants in different positions in two languages. Additionally, this study trains and supports student participation, contributing to the development of the next generation of language researchers. All sound productions require some degree of movement in the vocal tract, and languages generally show two processes that regulate the amount of effort involved in those movements, namely fortition (more articulatory effort and clearer gestures) and lenition (less effort and more relaxed movements). This study tests a) what kinds of consonants are affected by these two processes, b) how these two processes are conditioned by the position of the consonant (e.g., beginning of a word vs. between vowels vs. beginning of a phrase), and c) if some common sound patterns involving these two processes are predictable from the duration of different sounds. The analysis of two different languages also serves as a starting point for a cross-linguistic comparison leading to a greater understanding of the extent to which linguistic sound patterns are dependent on abstract mental processes or concrete physical ones. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.