[Fictionary] CAXON ballot (due 2/14) -- Eric wins!

[eLLioTT morEton]

On Sat, 25 Feb 2023, E Cohen wrote:

> But do human languages do this kind of? Like, if it's this kind of vowel in 
> the first syllable then it has to be this kind of vowel in the next, and if 
> they don't match then something has gone wrong?

Hi, Eric!

Indeed, human languages have redundancy that reduces the chances of
comprehension errors.  You can't just combine the sounds of a language
any old way.  Each language has its own phonotactic restrictions on
how they can be arranged, so that knowledge of a sound's neighbors
constrains what the sound can be.  People actually use this kind of
knowledge to help clear up perceptual ambiguities.  For example,
English words can start with /dr/ and /sl/, but not with *dl/ or
/sr/. and if you take a sound X that's acoustically intermediate
between /r/ and /l/, and put it in the environment dXa, English
speakers report hearing /l/, whereas if you put the same sound in the
environment sXa, they report hearing /r/ [Reference 1 below].  When
listening to words that start with /rd/ or similar un-English
clusters, English speakers report hearing an extra syllable and have
trouble distinguishing (e.g.) /rda/ from /r at da/ (@=schwa), whereas
speakers of Russian (which has word-initial falling-sonority clusters)
do not [2].

Vowel harmony of the sort you mentioned (phonetically-based
restrictions on what vowels can co-occur in the same word) can be used
by listeners to detect word boundaries [3]; e.g., if /e/ and /o/ can't
co-occur, then when you hear /kepola/, you know that it has to be /ke
pola/, not /kepo la/.  But as far as I can tell from half an hour's
rummaging on Google Scholar, no one has found, or even looked for,
vowel harmony being used resolve perceptual ambiguity.  I wonder why
not?

Regards,
Elliott


[1] Massaro, D. W., and M. M. Cohen (1983).  Phonological context in
speech perception.  Perception and Psychophysics 4:338--348.

[2] Berent, I., D. Steriade, T. Lennertz, and V. Vaknin (2007).  What
we know about what we have never heard: evidence from perceptual
illusions.  Cognition 104:591--630.

[3] Suomi, K., McQueen, J. M., & Cutler, A. (1997). Vowel harmony and
speech segmentation in Finnish. Journal of Memory and Language, 36(3),
422-444.