Course Description

The purpose of this course is to provide an overview of how experimental phonetics can be used to measure historical sound change. One of the main questions to be considered is: how exactly does the transmission of speech between a speaker and hearer give rise to sound change, especially since sound change seems to be so slow and gradual that it is scarcely perceptible? Part of the solution lies in understanding how sound change emerges from everyday variability in speech: such as (given sufficient context) the highly reduced, yet usually quite understandable production of a phonetic form close to 'gum' for 'government'. Another is a parsing issue: because speakers produce sounds so as to overlap with each other in time, there is the potential for sound change to emerge if listeners unintentionally parse the speech signal in ways not intended by the speaker. The first issue engages with the relationship between phonetics, phonology, the lexicon, and top-down processing; and the second with modelling the physical and biological limitations on the distribution of the sounds in the world's languages. Both issues, which draw upon a wide range of investigations into the synchronic mechanisms between the grammar and physics of speech, can begin to provide solutions to questions such as: to what extent is sound change teleological; and is it adaptive in an evolutionary sense?

Abstract

The principal aim in phonetics is to understand the way in which speech sounds are transmitted in spoken language communication between a speaker and hearer. This includes studying the movement and coordination of the vocal organs in the production of the possible speech sounds in the world's languages, how these are related to the acoustic speech signal that they give rise to, and the way in which the acoustic of speech are auditorily transformed by the hearing system. From another more abstract point of view, speech communication can also be considered as the transmission of a cipher of linguistic signs that can be combined and organized in different ways. One of the main tasks in experimental phonetics is to develop and test hypotheses about how these signs are related to the physical properties of speech production, acoustics, and perception. In order to quantify hypotheses, use is very often make of equipment for measuring the acoustic signal and listeners' responses to it; quantitative studies sometimes also incorporate a variety of physiological analyses such as techniques for measuring where the tongue contacts the roof of the mouth, the air-flow and pressure at different points in the vocal tract, and the inter-coordination between the tongue, lips and jaw.

A starting-point for addressing how language as a system of abstract signs is related to the physical properties of speech is to consider the different types of variability that arise in spoken language communication. This part of the discussion will show that some types of variability are unintentional, such as the tendency to put a short amount of silence between the /t/ and /s/ of tense thereby making it homophonous with tents, while others are evidently planned, such as the variation, depending on the speaking situation and pragmatic intent, to produce I don't know as three or four separate words on the one hand, but little more than a nasalized modulation of three brief vowels on the other.

The next main topic will be vowels which have formed part of many classic studies in phonetics. Here I will review the ways in which the distribution of vowels in the languages of the world is constrained by the speech production and perception systems. and the relationship between the two.

The focus of the discussion will then shift to intonation and prosody which at a more physical level can be defined as the contributions beyond consonants and vowels that are made by duration, pitch, and loudness to meaning and, at a more symbolic level, as the way in which sounds are organized into syllables, words, and phrases. Here it will be shown how speech synthesis, even in an extensively studied language like English, is still fall from natural, largely because the association between evolving meanings that glue together utterances in an ongoing dialogue and the transmission of these meanings prosodically in speech communication is still so poorly understood.

In the final part of the talk, I will return to the matter of abstract signs and their association with physical properties of speech communication, that is of how phonetics and phonology are inter-related: this is a theme that is especially relevant for developing models of speech production and perception in the cognitive science paradigm. To do so, I will consider the success with which a number of models, including those based on generative grammar, more recent exemplar views of speech that incorporate fine phonetic detail in the lexicon, as well as the model of articulatory phonology can account for the relationship between fine-grained (gradient) continuous processes of speech on the one hand, and contrastive sets of categories on the other.

Presenter

Professor Jonathan Harrington

Presenter Biography

Jonathan Harrington is Professor of Phonetics at the Institute of Phonetics and Speech Processing, University of Munich. He completed his PhD at Cambridge University in 1986 and has held appointments at the University of Kiel (2002-2006), Macquarie University (1989-2001) and Edinburgh University (1983-1989). His research is in laboratory phonology and with a particular emphasis in recent years on the phonetic bases of sound change. His book publications include Techniques in Speech Acoustics (with Steve Cassidy) and most recently The Phonetic Analysis of Speech Corpora. From 2001-2007 he was Associate Editor of the Journal of Phonetics. Jonathan Harrington is also an Adjunct Professor of Macquarie University's Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science.