speech production, first language acquisition, field phonetics, morphology, language shift, Quechua, Spanish

UNIFORMITY IN PHONETIC REALIZATION: EVIDENCE FROM SIBILANT PLACE OF ARTICULATION IN AMERICAN ENGLISH ELEANOR CHODROFF COLIN WILSON University of York Johns Hopkins University Phonetic realization is highly variable and highly structured within and across talkers. We examine three constraints that could structure the phonetic space of related speech sounds: target, contrast, and pattern uniformity. Target uniformity requires a uniform mapping from distinctive features to their corresponding phonetic targets within a talker, contrast uniformity requires a consistent difference in the phonetic targets that realize featural contrasts across talkers, and pattern uniformity requires a uniform template of phonetic targets across talkers. Focusing on American English sibilant fricatives, we measure and compare each constraint’s influence on the phonetic targets corresponding to place of articulation. We find that target uniformity is the strongest constraint : each talker realizes a given distinctive feature value in highly similar ways across related sounds. Together with similar findings for other sound classes, this result reveals fine-grained systematicity in the mapping from phonology to phonetics and has implications for theories of speech production and speech perception.* Keywords: phonetic realization, sibilant fricatives, uniformity, talker variability, Bayesian models 1. Introduction. No one-to-one mapping exists between linguistic units and their phonetic instantiations (Liberman et al. 1967, Massaro 1975, Pisoni & Sawusch 1975). This lack of invariance is a fundamental issue for both the perception and production of language. From the perspective of perception, how do perceivers adapt to extensive variation in the physical signal (whether spoken or signed)? From the perspective of production, how do producers know the limits of acceptable variation for their particular language variety, or even just for intelligibility? It is well established that variation in phonetic realization is extensive yet structured in many ways (Labov 1972, Miller 1994, Foulkes et al. 2001, Kleinschmidt & Jaeger 2015, Guy & Hinskens 2016, Sonderegger et al. 2020). In the present article, we explore potential constraints on the mapping from phonological representations, such as segments and their distinctive features, to targets of phonetic realization. We begin by considering a subinventory of two or more related sounds (e.g. [i] and [u], or [s] and [z]) and their corresponding phonetic targets (i.e. perceptuomotor representations ). A given talker could structure the phonetic realization of these sounds by copying a pattern or template of targets that exists in the speech community and adapting it to their anatomy. This scenario allows for talker variation—one speaker’s realization of the template may be overall higher or lower on a given phonetic dimension—but otherwise it can be construed as ‘maximal phonetic structure’. Provided that the hypothetical template can be adapted to each speaker’s anatomy, this system would be fully general across the speaker population. Moreover, clear motivation for such a system exists in speech perception : if each talker has the same template of phonetic targets, perceptual adaptation would involve a simple translation of the pattern for each new talker. This is in fact assumed by many approaches to talker normalization and adaptation, especially for vowel systems (e.g. Lobanov 1971, Nearey 1978, Nearey & Assmann 2007). 1 * The authors would like to thank Shravan Vasishth for hosting the 2020 Potsdam Summer School on Statistical Methods in Linguistics and Psychology, Lisa Davidson for sharing the laboratory data, and Ryan Cotterell , Matthew Faytak, Josef Fruehwald, and Jane Stuart-Smith for helpful discussion. All data and analyses are available at https://osf.io/bysfa/. Printed with the permission of Eleanor Chodroff & Colin Wilson. © 2022. In opposition to maximal phonetic structure in the speech inventory, we can consider ‘maximal phonetic bricolage’. Bricolage reflects the constellation of linguistic variables that a talker can exploit for expressing social identity (Eckert 2008, Zimman 2017); taken to the extreme, it would allow talkers to pick and choose phonetic targets independently for each sound. In this scenario, the phonetic space may be structured by overarching social variables, but it would be entirely unstructured within the subinventory and across speakers. For example, the relationship among the phonetic targets of sibilant fricatives like [s], [z], [ʃ], and [ʒ] could be different for each speaker, depending on how each target is chosen to express some aspect of social identity. Existing evidence points to an intermediate scenario between these two endpoints...

Reviewed by: Form and formalism in linguistics ed. by James McElvenny Margaret Thomas Form and formalism in linguistics. Ed. by James McElvenny. ( History and philosophy of the language sciences 1.) Berlin: Language Science, 2019. Pp. viii, 271. ISBN 9783961101832. $47 (Hb). The nine essays in this collection do not dwell on the well-known contrast between 'formalism' and 'functionalism' in linguistics as discussed in Newmeyer 1998, although they are not irrelevant to that debate. What they do dwell on is various senses of the word form and its derivatives, as they have been used in Euro-American history and philosophy of linguistics since the nineteenth century. Together, the chapters form a mosaic of scholarship on studies of language that variously incorporate diverse meanings of the terms 'form', 'formal', and 'formalism'. The assembly of chapters does, indeed, have a mosaic-like character in that it comprises independent, nonoverlapping texts. Chapter authors sometimes remark on how the edges of their topic approach those of other authors, but the individual contributions have not been forced into a unified tableau. The text presupposes some exposure to the history of western linguistics and to the history of philosophy. It would make bracing, but not impenetrable, reading for linguists without that background. Although only one of the nine authors has an affiliation in the United States, most chapters center on the work of well-known US-based scholars. Following a scene-setting preface by editor James McElvenny (iii–viii), Judith Kaplan's Ch. 1 (1–33) offers an analysis of 'formalism' in the sense of the diagrams or figures that comparativehistorical linguistics has used to visually communicate genealogical ('vertical') relationships among languages versus the ('horizontal') spread of features across languages spoken by adjacent populations. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, Kaplan reports that scholars first conveyed these facts in words and verbal metaphors, then adopted lists, tables, and graphic displays. All of these are 'formal' moves in that they distill complex relationships (of descent and of influence) into tables, trees, waves, or Venn-diagram-like figures, where the strategic arrangement of data in twodimensional space implies a specific position of those data vis-à-vis neighboring data. [End Page 643] Kaplan concedes at the beginning of her analysis that these diagrams or figures 'highlight certain notions of relationship while removing others from view' (3), because they typically prioritize either genealogical descent (e.g. trees) or crosslinguistic spreading (e.g. waves), and rarely both. She demonstrates how visual aids both reveal and conceal by analyzing their use in twentieth-century textbooks directed at beginning linguists. The chapter ends with an exposition of digital-era efforts to visualize vertical and horizontal relationships simultaneously in n-dimensional space while remaining faithful to the complexities of the data. Kaplan singles out multi-dimensional scaling as one promising technique. Unfortunately, her account of it is hampered by poor reproduction of the examples she cites (one in full color), as they appear both on the printed page (26, 28) and in the online version of her chapter (available at http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/214). Kaplan's case study of graphic representation in comparative-historical linguistics stands alone at the head of this collection as the only paper that takes 'formal' to mean 'amenable to summarizing complex facts and relationships in graphic form'. The attention Kaplan pays to student textbooks, however, returns at the end of the book. In between, the remaining eight chapters seem to fall into three sections. Chs. 2 through 4 address specific figures in the history of linguistics who make provocative use of the concept of 'form', or the partially overlapping concept 'structure', in their analyses of language phenomena. James McElvenny contributes a study pairing Columbia University anthropologist Franz Boas (1858–1942) with German philologist Georg von der Gabelentz (1840–1893) (35–58). Both scholars responded to the then-current claim that speakers of so-called 'primitive' languages freely and unsystematically alternate in their pronunciation of speech sounds, so that their words lack the fixity that characterizes languages not considered 'primitive'. Boas denied that 'alternating sounds' existed in the Native American languages that he studied. He attributed the...

The goal of this article is to provide a balanced assessment of the significance autism has for the scientific study of language. While linguistic profiles in autism vary greatly, spanning from a total absence of functional language to verbal levels within the typical range, the entire autism spectrum is robustly characterized by lifelong disabilities in intersubjective communication and persistent difficulties in adopting the perspective of other people. In that sense, autism constitutes a unique profile in which linguistic competence is dissociated from communication skills. Somewhat paradoxically, autism is often mentioned to underscore the importance of mind reading for language use and of intersubjective communication for the emergence of language. Yet experimental studies on pragmatics in autism indicate that many pragmatic processes unfold without adopting one's conversational partner's perspective. Moreover, the patterns of language acquisition and learning in autism represent a strong challenge to the central role constructionist theories assign to socio-communicative skills. Data on autism thus force a reconsideration of the a priori conceptual boundaries on language learnability that shape the foundational debates between constructionist and nativist linguistic theories.

The article presents a modified and updated version of the editors' report that was presented to the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) membership at the virtual annual meeting held on January 4, 2021. Topics discussed include impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the periodical, changes in the editorial team, and manuscript submissions and editorial action. It also acknowledges the support and contributions made by linguists to the journal including Natasha Abner, Eric Acton, and Claire Bowern.

Methods of quantifying distance between sound sequences are known as phonological distance measures. Despite the wide application across subfields, phonological distance has been calculated mainly with features related to consonants and vowels. This research report establishes new measurements of phonological distance that incorporate lexical tone through experimental approaches and modeling, using Hong Kong Cantonese as a case study. Results show correspondences between the experimental data and predictions from information-theoretic measures, including entropy measures and functional load, suggesting that lexical components which play a more crucial role in phonological distance judgments are lexically less predictable as well. Implications for phonological distance measures are discussed.

As a journal, Language has a substantial history of publishing articles about areas of linguistics now commonly identified as language documentation, revitalization, and reclamation. The significance of this vein of research is exemplified by the collection of articles published by Ken Hale and colleagues in this journal in 1992 (Hale et al. 1992). These articles present themselves as case studies of language revitalization, outlining arguments for the importance of linguistic training and assessing language vitality and diversity, all with more relevance than ever nearly three decades later. LANGUAGE REVITALIZATION AND DOCUMENTATION, a new section of the journal, will build upon the base of knowledge as a venue for peer-reviewed research articles in language revitalization and documentation. As the inaugural associate editor for this journal section, I outline a framework for the section as a starting point for submissions.