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Testing the P-Map: Lenition and Position

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Testing the P-Map: Lenition and Position Testing the P-Map: Lenition and Position Chad Hall Michigan State University 1 Introduction1 P-Map is a theory originally proposed by Steriade (2001) that is concerned with projecting the correspondence constraints involved in Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993). Steriade claims that the perceptibility of pairs of sounds depends on the context the sounds are in, and that the knowledge of these relative perceptibilities in different contexts (the “P-Map”) is used to obtain a hierarchy of correspondence constraints; these ranked correspondence constraints are used to explain phonological typology. For example, devoicing is common pre-consonantally and word-finally, but not in pre-vocalic environments. To explain this, she claims, based on some premises of the distribution of auditory cues, that the difference between [p] and [b] is perceived better before vowels than consonants or word-finally (e.g. [apa]/[aba] vs. [apta]/[abta]). However, Steriade provides little direct evidence for her claim, as there is little experimental work testing the relative perceptibility of contrasts in different phonological contexts. For the modest number of papers that do test the relative perceptibility, there is no perceptual testing of the same contrast in different phonological contexts: only various contrasts in the same position.1 1This paper seeks to give a more comprehensive testing of the context-sensitive relative similarity of contrasts that Steriade (2001) presumes. The limited prior experimental work that exists has supported the claim that the relative similarity of different contrasts parallels attested typological tendencies of phonological patterns. But no previous study has tested whether these relative similarity rankings hold across distinct phonological contexts: a key claim of Steriade’s. The particular phonological process in focus is lenition in the form of spirantization and devoicing.2 Using a similarity rating task, this paper will test the perceptual similarity of voicing and continuancy contrast pairs in intervocalic and word-final positions, exploring if ratings of similarity change with phonological context in a way that reflects attested phonological processes. The perceptibility of contrast related to devoicing and spirantization has been tested in specific phonological contexts (Kaplan 2010; Kawahara & Garvey, 2010). Both papers yielded results supporting Steriade’s claim that the relative perceptibilities of contrasts parallel the cross-linguistic typology of phonological patterns. However, there have been no experiments directly testing if the perception of these contrasts changes in a context-sensitive way. In this paper, I will show that the similarity judgements of voicing and continuancy contrasts vary depending on context, and furthermore that the voicing contrast is perceived as more similar intervocalically while the continuancy contrast is perceived as more similar word-finally. This mirrors the phonological typology for word-final devoicing and intervocalic spirantization, supporting Steriade’s notion that context plays a role in explaining the preference for certain phonological processes in specific contexts. 1.1 The initial motivation for the P-Map The main intuition behind Steriade’s proposal is that, typically, any phonological departure from the underlying form is minimal in order to achieve compliance *I would like to thank Suzanne Wagner, Yen-Hwei Lin, Laura Dilley, the audience at AMP 2017 and the Phonology- Phonetics group at Michigan State University for insightful comments and questions. I would like to give special thanks to Karthik Durvasula for his valuable assistance and advice in all aspects of this work. Thank you to Silvina Bongiovanni for helping in the creation of the stimuli, and thanks to Monica Nesbitt, Matt Savage and Alex Mason for their help in running the experiments. 1 Of course, the claim that there is a link between phonological typology and perceptual asymmetries existed before the P-Map (Lindblom 1986; Ohala 1981, 1993). However, I will discuss this claim from the perspective of the P-Map. 2 There is evidence to suggest that certain forms of devoicing constitute fortition (Iverson & Salmons 2007), however there are cases of devoicing which can fairly be described as lenition (see e.g. discussions of final devoicing as lenition in Honeybone 2012). In this paper, devoicing will be referred to as a form of lenition. © 2020 Chad Hall Proceedings of AMP 2019 Hall Testing the P-Map: Lenition and Position with phonotactic restrictions. This notion is formalized as follows: Form A is phonologically closer to form B than form C if the A-B distinction is more similar than the C-B distinction. The knowledge of this relative similarity is referred to as the P-Map. The P-Map was originally motivated by a problem within Optimality Theory (OT). In Classic OT in which correspondence and markedness constraints interact freely, the predicted amount of typological variation, related to common markedness constraints, is greater than has been actually observed. For example, across languages, the most common output form of /tæb/, apart from [tæb], is [tæp].3 From the perspective of OT, this alternation between [tæb] and [tæp] is due to the interaction between the markedness constraint *[+VOICE]/_]word (voiced obstruents do not occur at the end of a word) and the correspondence constraint Ident-IO [±voice] (corresponding input and output sounds should have identical values for the feature [voice]). Classic OT predicts that there should be more possible outputs such as [tæw] due to a freedom of interaction between various correspondence constraints with *[+VOICE]/_]word. These forms are, however, rarely (if ever) attested, suggesting that the interaction between markedness and correspondence constraints is not free. This has been called the “too-many-solutions” problem. Steriade suggested that the reason the most common output form of /tæb/ is [tæp] and not the other logically possible options is that the [tæb-tæp] pair is the most perceptually similar of all possible outputs. She proposed the P-Map as a collective term for (i) the speaker’s knowledge of perceptual similarity and (ii) the mechanism that relates the rankings of correspondence constraints to perceived differences in degrees of similarity. For example, if the P-Map identifies the pair [b]-[p] to be more perceptually similar after a vowel than [b]-[w] then the effect of P-Map on the grammar is to rank higher the correspondence constraint relative to the distinctive contrast [b]-[m]. Hence, IDENT-IO [±nasal] / V_ ] >> IDENT-IO [±voice] / V_ ]. As a consequence of this ranking, maintaining the contrast between nasal-oral, pre-vocalically, is more important than maintaining the contrast between voiced and voiceless. This in turn implies that a change in voicing is a less egregious change to remove or “repair” the markedness violation (*[+VOICE]/_]word) than a change in nasality. In essence, the analysis makes the prediction that, in order to satisfy a high-ranked constraint that blocks voiced obstruents in a word-final position (*[+VOICE]/_]word), changes from voiced to voiceless (devoicing) are going to be much more common than changes from oral to nasal (de-nasalization), as is observed in the attested typology of phonological patterns related to final voiced obstruents. 1.2 The unanswered questions of the P-Map The P-Map has been invoked to explain a wide range of phonological phenomena (Adler 2006; Côté 2004; Jun 2004; Kawahara 2006, 2007; Kawahara & Shinohara 2009; Kenstowicz 2007; Kwon 2005; McCarthy 2011; Steriade 2001a, 2003; Wilson 2006; Zuraw 2007). Whilst the theory of P-Map seems to be a sound approach in accounting for attested and unattested phonological patterns across languages, as well as potentially solving the too-many-solutions problem of OT, there are important questions that are yet to be answered. The first major issue is that despite P-Map being a perceptually grounded theory, little effort has been made to run perceptual experiments to test the P-Map. Instead, it has been assumed that relevant perceptual similarity scales parallel the cross-linguistic phonological patterns, without clear experimental evidence that justifies the presence of such perceptual scales for the different contrasts. The second issue, tied into the first problem, is that testing this supposed universal knowledge of perception is difficult, since language-specific phonetic and phonological knowledge affects speech perception (Dupoux et al. 1999; Massaro & Cohen 1983; Moreton 2002; Pitt 1998), though Kawahara & Garvey (2010) do point out that there can be universal perceptual patterns, sometimes observed in the perception patterns of non-speech sounds. Nevertheless, the following question remains: how can we test a universal scale of perceptual similarity when speech perception becomes language-specific very quickly? In Section 2, I provide a critical review of two rare papers in the sense that they report on perceptual experiments in order to test the P-Map: Kawahara and Garvey’s (2010) study of coda devoicing, and Kaplan’s (2010) study of intervocalic lenition, also noting problems in their methodologies.4 Then, after a brief 3 Other rarer (non-phonetically proximate) attested outputs such as [tæm] in particular languages are typically due to more than one historical language change (Merrill 2015). Capturing such alternations synchronically is an issue for the P-Map; however, I will set aside such patterns in the current
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