14.935, Review: Phonetics/Phonology:Gussenhoven & Warner (2002)

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LINGUIST List:  Vol-14-935. Sat Mar 29 2003. ISSN: 1068-4875.

Subject: 14.935, Review: Phonetics/Phonology:Gussenhoven & Warner (2002)

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Date:  Sat, 29 Mar 2003 15:31:13 +0000
From:  Gunnar Olafur Hansson <goh at uchicago.edu>
Subject:  Laboratory Phonology 7

-------------------------------- Message 1 -------------------------------

Date:  Sat, 29 Mar 2003 15:31:13 +0000
From:  Gunnar Olafur Hansson <goh at uchicago.edu>
Subject:  Laboratory Phonology 7

Gussenhoven, Carlos and Natasha Warner, eds. (2002) Laboratory
Phonology 7, Mouton de Gruyter, Phonology and Phonetics 4 (1).

Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/13/13-2344.html


Gunnar Olafur Hansson, University of Chicago.

OVERVIEW

The volume under review contains a selection of papers presented at
the 7th Conference on Laboratory Phonology (Nijmegen, 2000). It is
also the first LabPhon volume to appear under a new publisher, and
that change seems to have been beneficial in several respects. Unlike
most of its predecessors, this LabPhon volume is available in
paperback, which makes it far more affordable, especially to
students. Secondly, the delay between the conference itself and the
appearance of the proceedings -- a common source of dissatisfaction
about earlier volumes (see, e.g., Marija Tabain's review of LabPhon 5
in http://linguistlist.org/issues/12/12-1991.html) -- has been reduced
considerably. In fact, the current volume appeared several months
ahead of the immediately preceding one in the series. A further
improvement over previous LabPhon volumes is that every paper (except
for the commentaries) is now accompanied by an abstract summarizing
the topic under investigation and the findings reported.

The collection of papers is divided into two parts, the first dealing
with phonological issues from a psycholinguistic perspective (''Part
I: Phonological Processing and Encoding''), and the second addressing
the phonetics-phonology relationship more generally (''Part II: In the
Laboratory and in the Field: Relating Phonetics and Phonology''). As
in earlier LabPhon volumes, the individual contributions are organized
into blocks of 3-5 papers, where each block is followed by a
commentary article.

Within Part I, the first block of articles deals with issues related
to phonological encoding in production, i.e. the retrieval of
phonological forms from the lexicon and the construction of surface
representations. Daniel Jurafsky, Alan Bell & Cynthia Girand (''The
role of the lemma in form variation'') use corpus-based statistical
methods to investigate whether phonetic variation can be directly
sensitive to lemma distinctions--e.g., in cases like infinitival vs.
prepositional ''to'', where two separate lemmas share the same
phonological form. Niels O. Schiller, Albert Costa & Angels Colome
(''Phonological encoding of single words: In search of the lost
syllable'') critically evaluate the masked priming paradigm as a
method for testing the role of syllables as units of phonological
encoding. Vincent J. van Heuven & Judith Haan (''Temporal distribution
of interrogativity markers in Dutch: A perceptual study'') use a
gating task with synthesized Dutch intonation patterns to investigate
the temporal development of cues signalling the statement vs.
question contrast in Dutch. This is followed by a commentary article
by Willem Levelt (''Phonological encoding in speech production'')
which, among other things, includes a very brief historical overview
of the study of phonological encoding and the various experimental
paradigms that have been developed in that area.

The next block consists of five articles addressing issues of
phonological processing. In the first of these, Janet B.
Pierrehumbert (''Word-specific phonetics'') outlines an exemplar-based
model of speech production designed, in part, to cope with
word-specific phonetic detail; her proposal is discussed below. Danny
R. Moates, Zinny S. Bond & Verna Stockmal (''Phoneme frequency in
spoken word reconstruction'') explore the effect of phoneme frequency
in word reconstruction tasks--adjusting a single segment to convert a
nonword into a word--to test whether frequency can account for the
greater ''mutability'' of vowels than consonants in such tasks. Haruo
Kubozono (''Temporal neutralisation in Japanese'') documents the
pervasive neutralization of vowel length contrasts in word-final
position in Japanese, both in phonological processes and in auditory
perception, and shows in a series of experiments how the same effect
is also found in perception of speech by visual stimuli alone. Sharon
Peperkamp & Emmanuel Dupoux (''A typological study of stress
'deafness''') demonstrate how speakers of different languages with
non-contrastive stress systems differ in their ability to perceive
stress contrasts, and outline an explanation in terms of a particular
timeline of language acquisition. Ann R. Bradlow (''Confluent talker-
and listener-oriented forces in clear speech production'')
investigates the extent of coarticulation in hyperarticulated speech,
as well as the question of whether hyperarticulation is ''global'' or
relativized based on such listener-oriented factors as perceptual
confusability. A commentary article by Ann Cutler (''Phonological
processing'') concludes this block of papers.

Part II is a somewhat more heterogeneous collection of studies dealing
with the relationship between phonetics and phonology broadly
speaking, organized into three blocks. The first consists of four
articles investigating various aspects of the phonetics-phonology
interface. George N. Clements & Sylvester Osu (''Explosives,
implosives, and nonexplosives: the phonological function of air
pressure differences in stops'') investigate the phonetics and
phonology of a class of segments they call ''nonobstruent
stops''--including, e.g., implosives and laryngealized stops--and
report on an articulatory and acoustic study of two such segments in
Ikwere which appear to defy traditional phonetic classification.
Maria-Josep Sole (''Assimilatory processes and aerodynamic factors'')
investigates the assimilation of lingual fricatives to apical trills,
and explores the role of aerodynamic constraints in accounting for
these and other assimilations involving fricatives. Sonia Frota
(''Tonal association and target alignment in European Portuguese
nuclear falls'') presents acoustic evidence suggesting that nuclear
falls in Portuguese declarative intonation are to be treated as
bitonal pitch accents (HL) rather than as transition effects, and
investigates the timing relationship between the two components of
such bitonal accents. Ioana Chitoran, Louis Goldstein & Dani Byrd
(''Gestural overlap and recoverability: Articulatory evidence from
Georgian'') use a magnetometric production study of Georgian stop-stop
clusters to test (and confirm) the hypothesis that the extent of
gestural overlap in such clusters is dependent on the perceptual
recoverability of C1--and thus, indirectly, on such factors as
position within the word and place-of-articulation sequencing. Bruce
Hayes, in his commentary article (''The phonetics-phonology
interface''), takes up some of the questions left unanswered by
Chitoran et al., and conjectures that some of the Georgian stop-stop
clusters may in fact be produced with an egressive velaric airstream
mechanism.

The next block consists of papers that are either studies based on
fieldwork or that address general questions of how phonetic data
gathered in the field can be used to test phonological theories. In
the first of these, Didier Demolin (''The search for primitives in
phonology and the explanation of sound patterns: The contribution of
fieldwork studies'') takes as his point of departure the hypothesis
that phonology is emergent and derived from phonetics (cf. Lindblom
2000), and shows several examples of how fieldwork data from
underdescribed languages can be brought to bear on this hypothesis.
The remaining three articles all deal with prosodic phenomena, using
fieldwork data to call into question traditional categories and
typological classifications in this domain. Esther Grabe & Ee Ling Low
(''Acoustic correlates of rhythm class'') question the rhythmic
classification of languages as either stress-timed, syllable-timed or
mora-timed, using measurements of durational variability in the
acoustic signal that do not refer to phonological constructs such as
''syllable'' or ''stressed syllable''; they find that many hitherto
unclassified languages are intermediate between the traditional
categories. Jose I. Hualde, Gorka Elordieta, Inaki Gaminde & Rajka
Smiljanic (''From pitch accent to stress accent in Basque'') question
the categoriality of the typological distinction between pitch-accent
and stress languages, showing how western dialects of Basque
constitute a continuum along this dimension. Bert Remijsen
(''Lexically contrastive stress accent and lexical tone in Ma'ya'')
uses phonological and acoustic analysis to argue that Ma'ya, an
endangered Austronesian language, displays a previously unattested
combination of a (three-way) lexical tone contrast and a lexical
stress contrasts. The section is concluded with a commentary article
by W. Leo Wetzels (''Field work and phonological theory'').

The final block consists of a single article by Aditi Lahiri & Henning
Reetz (''Underspecified recognition''), followed by a commentary
article by Dafydd Gibbon (''Speech recognition''). In their paper,
Lahiri & Reetz develop a model of the lexicon that makes crucial use
of abstract, featurally underspecificied phonological
representations. They support their model with evidence from
historical change, language comprehension experiments and, most
importantly, its performance when implemented computationally in an
automatic speech recognition system.

CRITICAL EVALUATION

The individual contributions that make up this volume are so numerous
and so diverse that it is impossible to do justice to all of them
beyond the brief descriptions given above. Here I will only mention in
somewhat more detail two papers which, in my mind, stand out due to
the scope of the issues they address and their implications.

The first of these is Didier Demolin's article on the contribution of
empirical fieldwork to the search for primitives and first principles
in phonology. This paper is quite programmatic in character; Demolin
is a strong advocate of the ''emergent phonology'' approach (see,
e.g., Ohala 1990; Lindblom 2000). This approach sees the fundamental
units and processes of phonology as deductively derived from
independent premises anchored in physical and physiological
realities. Demolin argues that experimental research ''in the field''
on uncommon sound patterns can be brought to bear on this
hypothesis. He surveys a wealth of fascinating phenomena from
relatively underdescribed languages to demonstrate their dependence on
aerodynamic principles as well as on principles relating acoustic
output to vocal tract shape and to auditory representation. Sound
patterns involving ejective fricatives in Amharic and bilabial trills
in Mangbetu are shown to be critically shaped by aerodynamic
constraints. The rich vowel inventory of Nuer is used to test
principles of maximal dispersion, and it is demonstrated that several
factors, physical as well as physiological, converge to account for
the distribution of vowels in acoustic space. Vowelless syllables in
Lendu (specifically ones where the nucleus is a sibilant), and sound
changes involving clicks in Khoisan languages, confirm the important
role played by perceptual and auditory factors in phonological
patterning. A final question addressed by Demolin is that of the
cognitive representation of sound patterns, and the psychological
reality of such constructs as syllables, features, etc. Complex word
game permutation patterns in Hendo (an unwritten language) are
mentioned as a potential challenge to the claim that awareness of
segments/phonemes is dependent on familiarity of an alphabetic writing
system; however, it turns out that a quasi-alphabetic (and even
feature-based!) system of color symbols is in fact used to teach the
word games during initiation rites. This last part of Demolin's
article is perhaps the weakest; as pointed out by Wetzels in his
commentary, many of the operations typical of word games, such as
infixation and the reduplication of constituents of various sizes, do
exist as grammatical operations in languages, written and unwritten.

Janet Pierrehumbert's article on word-specific phonetics challenges
many commonly-held views (at least among phonologists) about the
nature and amount of phonetic information that goes into lexical
representations. Unlike in the heyday of structuralist and
classical-generative phonology, it has by now become generally
accepted that a great deal of fine-grained phonetic detail is
language-specific, thus necessitating at least something like a
''phonetic implementation'' component in the phonological systems of
individual languages. What many recent studies have brought to light,
however, is that the patterning of such allophonic detail is not as
across-the-board as it originally appeared, but that much of it is in
fact specific to individual words in the lexicon. Pierrehumbert
discusses how such phenomena can be straightforwardly accounted for by
an exemplar-based model of speech production. In such a model, each
word is associated with its own frequency distribution over phonetic
outcomes; these ''clouds'' of exemplars, stored in long-term memory,
are continuously and incrementally updated based on experience, which
allows word-specific allophonic detail to accrue over time. There are
two aspects of Pierrehumbert's proposal which are particularly
significant. The first is the general idea of extending exemplar
theory, which was originally developed for speech perception, to the
domain of speech production. The second has to do with a problem that
immediately arises in a simple model where words activate exemplar
clouds directly, rather than mediated by decomposition into
phonological units. The long-term results of such a system would be
arbitrary dispersion across phonetic hyperspace, rather than the
systematicity and granularity that is so characteristic of both
synchronic phonological systems and of (Neogrammarian) diachronic
sound changes. Pierrehumbert's solution is to develop a hybrid model
which uses an intermediate level of phonological encoding and
buffering, where a phonological parse is assigned; the contents of
this representation probabilistically evoke regions of the exemplar
space as production goals. In this model, word-specific effects are
second-order phenomena: rather than providing holistic production
goals, words are able to bias productions. One of the virtues of the
model is that it straightforwardly accounts for cases of ''allophonic
transfer'' between morphologically related forms (see, e.g., Steriade
2000).

To conclude, this latest volume in the Laboratory Phonology series is
a highly impressive collection of studies on a wide variety of topics,
contributing to our understanding of the relationship not only between
phonetics and phonology but also between each of these and the
psycholinguistic domains of encoding and processing. It is worth
emphasizing that laboratory phonology is not a theoretical framework
in the usual sense; rather, it is ''a coalition amongst groups of
people, with some working in one or another of the various current
frameworks, and others working in no phonological framework at all''
(Pierrehumbert et al. 2000:279). As a consequence, it is not uncommon
to find inherently conflicting or contradictory proposals within the
laboratory phonology literature. This volume is no exception; for
example, it is hard to see how Lahiri & Reetz' model, where lexical
representations are heavily underspecified (and couched in discrete
phonological features), can possibly be reconciled with exemplar-based
models of perception and production such as the one advocated by
Pierrehumbert. Similarly, there are no doubt many ''laboratory
phonologists'' who would disagree with Clements & Osu's decision to
account for the behavior of nonexplosive stops in terms of a new
binary phonological feature [+/-obstruent]. What the ''genre'' of
laboratory phonology studies does have as its common denominator,
however, is the belief that careful experimental methodology, explicit
mathematical modelling (typically in terms of continuous rather than
discrete mathematics), and cumulation of results can and will
strengthen the scientific foundations of phonology as a
discipline. The respect and citation record that the LabPhon series
has attained, during the sixteen years since its inception, is ample
attestation to the vitality and viability of this research paradigm.

REFERENCES

Lindblom, B. 2000. Developmental origins of adult phonology: The
interplay between phonetic emergents and the evolutionary adaptations
of sound patterns. Phonetica 57, 297-314.

Ohala, J. 1990. The phonetics and phonology of aspects of
assimilation. In J. Kingston & M. Beckman (eds.), Papers in Laboratory
Phonology I: Between the Grammar and the Physics of Speech,
pp. 258-275. Cambridge: CUP.

Pierrehumbert, J., Beckman, M. & Ladd, R. 2000. Conceptual foundations
of phonology as a laboratory science. In N.  Burton-Roberts, P. Carr &
G. Docherty (eds.), Phonological Knowledge: Conceptual and Empirical
Issues, pp. 273-303. Oxford: OUP.

Steriade, D. 2000. Paradigm uniformity and the phonetics-phonology
interface. In M. Broe & J. Pierrehumbert (eds.), Papers in Laboratory
Phonology V: Acquisition and the Lexicon, pp. 313-335. Cambridge: CUP.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Gunnar Olafur Hansson is Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the
University of Chicago. He received his Ph.D. in 2001 from the
University of California, Berkeley, with a dissertation entitled
"Theoretical and typological issues in consonant harmony". The focus
of his research is on theoretical phonology; specific areas of
interest include harmony systems, derivationally opaque sound
patterns, the phonetics-phonology and morphology-phonology interfaces,
and diachronic processes of phonologization and morphologization.


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