{"title":"The effect of homophony avoidance in voicing","authors":"Zoltán G. Kiss","doi":"10.57133/evenyrbk.22gk","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"It has been long acknowledged that the production and perception of speech are affected by the presence or absence of higher levels of linguistic information, too. The recoverability of meaning heavily relies on semantic context (Ganong 1980); similarly, the precision of articulation is inversely proportional to the presence of semantic information (Goldrick et al. 2013; Kitahara et al. 2019). Diachronic phonological processes, for example, are often reported to seek homophony avoidance (see, e.g., Silverman 2012). The question arises whether homophony avoidance is actively present in synchronic language use, too, and how (if at all) it interacts with phonological contrast maintenance or neutralisation. A number of studies demonstrate that laryngeal processes previously considered to be neutralising (e.g., word-final devoicing, voicing assimilation) are not completely neutralizing phonetically. An underlyingly voiced obstruent often contains more phonation in devoicing contexts than an underlyingly voiceless obstruent, or if this is not the case, other phonetic features like the length of the preceding vowel, or the vowel/consonant duration ratio are systematically different, thereby maintaining the underlying laryngeal contrast (Bárkányi and G. Kiss 2019 provide an overview in Hungarian of this). The present study seeks to explore to what extent a particular lexical factor, homophony avoidance, i.e., whether or not a word forms a minimal pair with another word in the lexicon (“minimal pairhood”), affects the realisation of the primary laryngeal feature, the amount of phonation, in the word-final alveolar stops /t/ and /d/ and the fricatives /s/ and /z/ in potentially neutralising and nonneutralising contexts in the speech of Hungarian native speakers. To this end, acoustic experiments were carried out with test words ending in these obstruents in minimal pairs and non-minimal pairs that were placed in various phonetic environments.","PeriodicalId":383885,"journal":{"name":"The Even Yearbook","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"The Even Yearbook","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.57133/evenyrbk.22gk","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
It has been long acknowledged that the production and perception of speech are affected by the presence or absence of higher levels of linguistic information, too. The recoverability of meaning heavily relies on semantic context (Ganong 1980); similarly, the precision of articulation is inversely proportional to the presence of semantic information (Goldrick et al. 2013; Kitahara et al. 2019). Diachronic phonological processes, for example, are often reported to seek homophony avoidance (see, e.g., Silverman 2012). The question arises whether homophony avoidance is actively present in synchronic language use, too, and how (if at all) it interacts with phonological contrast maintenance or neutralisation. A number of studies demonstrate that laryngeal processes previously considered to be neutralising (e.g., word-final devoicing, voicing assimilation) are not completely neutralizing phonetically. An underlyingly voiced obstruent often contains more phonation in devoicing contexts than an underlyingly voiceless obstruent, or if this is not the case, other phonetic features like the length of the preceding vowel, or the vowel/consonant duration ratio are systematically different, thereby maintaining the underlying laryngeal contrast (Bárkányi and G. Kiss 2019 provide an overview in Hungarian of this). The present study seeks to explore to what extent a particular lexical factor, homophony avoidance, i.e., whether or not a word forms a minimal pair with another word in the lexicon (“minimal pairhood”), affects the realisation of the primary laryngeal feature, the amount of phonation, in the word-final alveolar stops /t/ and /d/ and the fricatives /s/ and /z/ in potentially neutralising and nonneutralising contexts in the speech of Hungarian native speakers. To this end, acoustic experiments were carried out with test words ending in these obstruents in minimal pairs and non-minimal pairs that were placed in various phonetic environments.
人们早就认识到,语言的产生和感知也受到更高层次语言信息存在与否的影响。意义的可恢复性在很大程度上依赖于语义语境(Ganong 1980);同样,发音的精度与语义信息的存在成反比(Goldrick et al. 2013;Kitahara et al. 2019)。例如,据报道,历时语音过程经常寻求避免同音谐音(参见,例如,Silverman 2012)。问题出现了,同音回避是否也积极地存在于共时语言使用中,以及它是如何(如果有的话)与语音对比维持或中和相互作用的。许多研究表明,以前被认为是中和的喉部过程(例如,词尾发声,发声同化)并没有完全中和语音。在发声环境中,潜在的发声障碍通常比潜在的不发声障碍包含更多的发音,或者如果不是这样,其他语音特征,如前元音的长度,或元音/辅音的持续时间比是系统不同的,从而保持潜在的喉部对比(Bárkányi和G. Kiss 2019用匈牙利语对此进行了概述)。本研究旨在探索一个特定的词汇因素,同音避免,即一个单词是否与词汇中的另一个单词形成最小成对(“最小成对”),在多大程度上影响了匈牙利语母语者在潜在中和和非中和语境中,在单词的最后一个alveolar stops /t/和/d/以及摩擦音/s/和/z/中实现喉音的主要特征,即发音量。为此,在声学实验中,以这些障碍结尾的测试词以最小对和非最小对的形式被放置在不同的语音环境中。