Cognitive processing as a bridge between phonetic and social models of sound change

The seven papers in this special edition are derived from the 2nd Workshop on Sound Change held at Kloster Seeon, Germany, in May 2012. The purpose of the workshop was to bring together scientists approaching the question of sound change and its relationship to synchronic variation in speech from many different disciplinary perspectives that we believe are necessary for understanding this complex relationship. The publications in this special issue are a reflection of this breadth and cover a wide range of issues, such as the influence on sound change of child speech, dialect contact, social differences, coarticulatory variation, and imitation. The studies draw upon several languages (Mandarin Chinese, English, German, Khmer, Korean, Spanish) and employ diverse experimental techniques for relating synchronic variation and diachronic change, including ultrasound measurements of the tongue (Lin et al.), acoustic and perceptual analyses of multilingual corpora (Beckman et al.), measurements of oral and nasal airflow in combination with the perceptual analysis of aerodynamic variation (Sole), and computational modelling (Kirby). It has been convenient in the literature so far to draw a distinction between the conditions that give rise to sound change as opposed to those that are concerned with its spread through the community (e.g., Ohala 1993). A classic issue within the first of these is phonologization (Hyman 1976), which can often be related synchronically to a change in the way that the multiple features which cue a phonological distinction are parsed in the speech signal. Four papers in this special issue address this issue. In Kirby’s study, phonologization arises when laryngeal features (primarily fundamental frequency) and/or voice onset time take over from a trill in distinguishing pairs such as /kru:, ku:/ in the colloquial Phnom Penh variety of Khmer. The phonetic basis of this change is likely to be a drop in fundamental frequency