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- Title
Changing Words and Sounds: The Roles of Different Cognitive Units in Sound Change.
- Authors
Sóskuthy, Márton; Foulkes, Paul; Hughes, Vincent; Haddican, Bill
- Abstract
This study considers the role of different cognitive units in sound change: phonemes, contextual variants and words. We examine /u/‐fronting and /j/‐dropping in data from three generations of Derby English speakers. We analyze dynamic formant data and auditory judgments, using mixed effects regression methods, including generalized additive mixed models (GAMMs). /u/‐fronting is reaching its end‐point, showing complex conditioning by context and a frequency effect that weakens over time. /j/‐dropping is declining, with low‐frequency words showing more innovative variants with /j/ than high‐frequency words. The two processes interact: words with variable /j/‐dropping (new) exhibit more fronting than words that never have /j/ (noodle) even when the /j/ is deleted. These results support models of change that rely on phonetically detailed representations for both word‐ and sound‐level cognitive units. Sóskuthy, Foulkes, Hughes & Haddican (2018) show that the realization of one phonetic variable is linked with the word it occurs in and whether a second phonetic variable can be found in that word. Their findings are coherent with models of language that simultaneously consider representation of sounds, words and phonetic variants of words as cognitive units involved in language production and perception.
- Subjects
COGNITIVE science; PHONEME (Linguistics); LEXICAL access; NEOGRAMMARIANS; ENGLISH language terms &; phrases
- Publication
Topics in Cognitive Science, 2018, Vol 10, Issue 4, p787
- ISSN
1756-8757
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/tops.12346