Alek Storm

Project 2
Elements of Psycholinguistics

I will investigate allophones of American English /ɑ/ in dialects without the cot-caught merger.
This low-back vowel phoneme is subject to considerable variation phonetically, which some
researchers would consider surprising, given the dense vowel space of English. I will consider low-
high diphthongs /aɪ/ and /aʊ/ to be separate phonemes, and will not consider them here. The complex
prosodic structure of English causes widespread allophony: for example, vowels in phrase-final
syllables are lengthened (Klatt 1976; Wightman 1992), presumably to carry more complex boundary
tone information. Klatt (1975) measured this effect to be as much as a 30% difference. English also
has strong lexical stress, and unstressed vowels are subject to reduction (Beckman 1986): specifically,
back vowels, such as /ɑ/, have developed into schwa /ə/, and front vowels into /ɨ/ (Wells 1982).
Unstressed vowels can even be deleted in many contexts (Głowacka 2001). Though unstressed vowels
are usually considered separate phonemes, when morphologically conditioned through stress
placement, [ə] can appear as an allophone of /ɑ/, as in the pair /ˈfoʊtɑgɹæf/ ~ /foʊˈtɑgɹæfi/, which are
produced as [ˈfoʊɾəgˌɹæf] and [fəˈtɑgɹɨˌfi], respectively. According to Bolinger (1989), /ə/ can vary
between [ə], [ɐ], and [a], and this is confirmed by Fowler (1981), in which it was found that F2 values
of schwa vowels were significantly affected in unstressed syllables. In fact, vowel-to-vowel
coarticulation occurs in stressed vowels as well, though to a lesser extent, in both F1 and F2 (Fowler
1981; Magen 1995; Öhman 1966), providing another category of /ɑ/ allophony. Consonant
coarticulation with a vowel forms a much more consistent effect, and is one of the main acoustic cues
for place of articulation (Cooper et al. 1952; Fischer-Jørgensen 1972; Stevens & Blumstein 1978). For
example, each of the first three formants relevant to vowel perception (Ladefoged 2005) are gradually
lowered when contiguous with a labial consonant, and F2 is raised and F3 lowered simultaneously near
velar consonants, resulting in a “velar pinch”. However, in the case of coda /ɹ/, the vowel of the
nucleus (in this case, /ɑ/, denoted [ɑ˞]) has a lowered F3 due to retroflexion of the tongue tip
throughout the vowel segment, as opposed to other consonants, which affect only the marginal portions
of the vowel. Of course, there is also the well-documented nasalization of vowels before (and
sometimes after) nasal stops due to mistiming the opening of the velopharyngeal port (Ladefoged &
Maddieson 1996), denoted [ ɑ̃]. In addition, one of the distinctive components of English stress is
raised F0 (Beckman 1986), which is a major allophone in English, as different F0 realizations can be
highly contrastive in tone languages such as Mandarin Chinese (Hashimoto 1970) and Thai
(Frankfurter 1900).

Target
“register” /ɹɛdʒɪstɚ/
Phonological neighbors
“gist” /dʒɪst/, “reporter” /ɹɛpɔɹtɚ/, “gin” /dʒɪn/, “read” /ɹɛd/, “turn” /tɚn/, “rejoin” /rɛdʒɔɪn/, “stir” /
stɚ/, “steam” /stim/, “edge” /ɛdʒ/, “mister” /mɪstɚ/, “dredge” /dɹɛdʒ/, “gym” /dʒɪm/, “ledger” /
lɛdʒɚ/
Semantic neighbors
“cash”, “money”, “till”, “pay”, “coin”, “bill”, “sell”, “ATM”, “buy”, “total”, “purchase”, “ring up”,
“shop”, “wallet”
Mixed neighbors
“dollar” /dɑlɚ/, “receipt” /rɛsit/, “change” /tʃeɪndʒ/

Predicting the behavior of mixed neighbors under both phonological and semantic priming is
difficult, as there are many conflicting factors to take into account. The first is the apparently
synergistic relation between phonology and semantics in speech error production, in which phoneme
switching errors are more likely to occur when the error has been artificially primed, as in experiments
that show that the phrase “get one” is four times more likely to be produced as “wet gun” when the
speaker has recently read “damp rifle”, or even when the error is at a base level of priming by simply
occurring in the lexicon: actual words are more likely to be produced than non-words. Thus, an
“interactive” model has been proposed, in which the semantic and phonological components, rather
than being activated in sequence, influence each other throughout the process of speech production.
However, this is vague and simplistic, and does not account for the apparently contradictory roles
played by the two components in tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) state: if phonological as well as semantic
neighbors prime each other for speech errors, then why does priming with phonological neighbors
increase the occurrence of the TOT state, while priming with semantic neighbors reduces it?
Instead, I propose a solution wherein the active articulatory plan remains in memory for a short
time post-production, and blocks (or similarly confounds) either the queueing of already-retrieved new
material or the retrieval of syntactically-specified new material from the lexicon, if that new material is
similar to material already present in the articulatory plan. This accounts for both speech errors, in
which similar phonological material is exchanged, deleted, etc, and TOT state, in which the retrieval of
new phonological material is blocked by similar previous material, yet previously-encountered
semantic primes improve retrieval. Note that this posits that read or heard stimuli also enter into the
abstract articulatory plan.

References

Beckman, M. E. (1986) Stress and Non-Stress Accent. Dordrecht: Foris

Bolinger, D. (1989) Intonation and its uses. Stanford University Press
Clark, J. E., Yallop, C., & Fletcher, J. (2007) An introduction to phonetics and phonology. Malden:
Wiley-Blackwell Publishing
Cooper, F., Delattr, P., Liberman, A., Borst, J., & Gerstman, L. (1952) “Some experiments on the
perception of synthetic speech sounds”, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 24,
597-606
Głowacka, D. (2001) “Unstressed Vowel Deletion and New Consonant Clusters in English”, Poznań
Studies in Contemporary Linguistics, 37, 71-94
Fischer-Jørgensen, E. (1972) “Perceptual studies of Danish stop consonants”, Annual Report of the
Institute of Phonetics, University of Copenhagen, 6, 75-168
Fowler, C. A. (1981) “Production and perception of coarticulation among stressed and unstressed
vowels”, Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 46, 127-139
Frankfurter, O. (1900) Elements of Siamese grammar with appendices. American Presbyterian mission
press
Hashimoto, M. (1970) “Notes on Mandarin Phonology”, in Jakobson, R. & Kawamoto, S., Studies in
General and Oriental Linguistics, Tokyo: TEC, 207-220
Klatt, D. H. (1975) “Vowel Lengthening is Syntactically Determined in a Connected Discourse”,
Journal of Phonetics, 3, 129-140
Klatt, D. H. (1976) “Linguistic uses of segmental duration in English: Acoustic and perceptual
evidence”, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 59, 1208-1221
Ladefoged, P. (2005) Vowels and consonants: an introduction to the sounds of languages. Malden:
Wiley-Blackwell Publishing
Ladefoged, P. & Maddieson, I. (1996) The sounds of the world's languages. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell
Publishing
Magen, H. S. (1995) “The extent of vowel-to-vowel coarticulation in English”, Journal of Phonetics,
25, 187-205
Öhman, S. E. G. (1966) “Coarticulation in VCV utterances: Spectrographic measurements”, Journal of
the Acoustical Society of America, 39, 151-168
Stevens, K. & Blumstein, S. (1978) “Invariant cues for place of articulation in stop consonants”,
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 64, 1358-1368
Wells, J. C. (1982) Accents of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Wightman, C. W., Shattuck-Hufnagel, S., Ostendorf, M., & Price, P. J. (1992) “Segmental Durations in
the Vicinity of Prosodic Phrase Boundaries”, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 91,
1707-1717