18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences Satellite Event The Evolution of Phonetic Capabilities: Causes Constraints Consequences Glasgow, August 12, 2015 Proceedings edited by Hannah Little TABLE OF CONTENTS Hannah Little Introduction……………………………………………….………………........….…. 1 John H. Esling, Allison Benner & Scott R. Moisik Laryngeal Articulatory Function and Speech Origins…………..……..….…………. 2 Scott R. Moisik & Dan Dediu Anatomical biasing and clicks: Preliminary biomechanical modeling ……........…… 8 Seán G. Roberts, Caleb Everett & Damián Blasi Exploring potential climate effects on the evolution of human sound systems …..… 14 Padraic Monaghan & Willem H. Zuidema General purpose cognitive processing constraints and phonotactic properties of the vocabulary ……………………..……..………… 20 Bodo Winter & Andy Wedel Simulating the interaction of functional pressure, redundancy and category variation in phonetic systems ………………………………………... 25 Bill Thompson Universality in Cultural Transmission …...……………………………………….... 30 INTRODUCTION TO THE EVOLUTION OF PHONETIC CAPABILITIES SATELLITE MEETING Hannah Little Artificial Intelligence Lab, Vrije Universiteit Brussel [email protected] 1. AIMS OF THE MEETING or phonological capabilities, both in biological and cultural evolution. Further, they discuss the conse- In the field of language evolution, new techniques quences that biological constraints, or even external have emerged in computational and mathematical constraints in our environments, might have on pro- modelling, experimental paradigms, brain and vo- cesses of cultural evolution, and vice versa. cal tract imaging, and typological data. These tech- Firstly we have contributions which deal directly niques have allowed us to address questions relevant with physical aspects of the vocal tract affecting cul- to the evolution of our phonetic capabilities. Multi- tural processes. John H. Esling, Allison Benner and disciplinary discourse is now necessary. Scott R. Moisik investigate how the larynx affects Previously, the evolution of speech has been ad- language acquisition, and what this might mean for dressed, for the most part, separately to the evolu- both the biological and cultural evolution of lan- tion of language. The difference between these two guage. Scott R. Moisik and Dan Dediu created a fields can be characterised in the difference between vocal tract model to test if anatomical variation can language and speech, language being a communica- bias the production of clicks, in order to explore tion system irrespective of its modality, while speech the consequences that physical characteristics might refers only to the spoken modality. Fitch [2] argues have on cultural evolution. Padraic Monaghan and that while the evolution of speech and language are Willem H. Zuidema also touch on how constraints of obviously very relevant to each other, they might speech production might affect language, presenting have been subject to different evolutionary pres- a corpus study investigating effects on repetition of sures, making it advantageous to investigate them phonemes within words. separately. Indeed, within language evolution, lan- Seán G. Roberts, Caleb Everett and Damián Blasi guage is framed as the result of cognitive mecha- introduce “evolutionary geophonetics", an explo- nisms, whether specific to language or not, or func- ration on whether climate might influence language tional mechanisms such as communication or trans- evolution through either biological or cultural adap- mission. Studies on the evolution of speech, on the tations. other hand, focus primarily on the evolutionary pres- Finally, we have contributions which use compu- sures behind the physical biology of the vocal tract tational models to address the topics of the meeting. (see [1] for a review). This has lead to work on the Bodo Winter and Andy Wedel present a simulation evolution of speech focussing on biological evolu- showing that functional pressions for distinctiveness tion, while work on the evolution of language fo- at the word level, can influence variation at the pho- cusses more on linguistic development and cultural netic level. Bill Thompson uses his model to in- evolution. In the interests of opening a dialogue be- vestigate how variation in phonetic categories at the tween language evolution and speech evolution, we population-level can be affected by individual-level will consider how the physical aspects of a linguis- category acquisition. tic modality might shape our language, and how our phonetic capabilities at the speech level may influ- 3. REFERENCES ence our phonology at the language level. [1] Fitch, W. T. 2000. The evolution of speech: a com- 2. CONTRIBUTIONS parative review. Trends in cognitive sciences 4(7), 258–267. [2] Fitch, W. T. 2002. Comparative vocal production and This workshop has a wide range of contributions, the evolution of speech: reinterpreting the descent of from across disciplines, which cover typological the larynx. Wray, A., (ed), The transition to lan- data and acquisition data, as well as simulations and guage. Oxford University Press Oxford 21–45. models. All of the contributions explore evolution- ary pressures causing the emergence of our phonetic 1 LARYNGEAL ARTICULATORY FUNCTION AND SPEECH ORIGINS John H. Esling1, Allison Benner1, Scott R. Moisik2 1University of Victoria, 2Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] ABSTRACT significantly large and strategic portion of the vocal tract, as depicted in the ‘Laryngeal Articulator The larynx is the essential articulatory mechanism Model’ [10, 11], which has nevertheless been that primes the vocal tract. Far from being only a generally overlooked in considering the ontogeny glottal source of voicing, the complex laryngeal and phylogeny of the phonetic capacity. mechanism entrains the ontogenetic acquisition of It has also been observed that infants, in their speech and, through coarticulatory coupling, guides first months of life, produce a range of utterances, the production of oral sounds in the infant vocal reflecting both phonatory possibilities and stricture tract. As such, it is not possible to speculate as to the types, that can be directly attributed to the laryngeal origins of the speaking modality in humans without articulator mechanism. Systematic observation of considering the fundamental role played by the infants’ early speech production reveals that the laryngeal articulatory mechanism. The Laryngeal control of articulatory detail in the pharynx is Articulator Model, which divides the vocal tract into mastered during the first year of life [3, 13, 2, 18]. a laryngeal component and an oral component, The control and growing understanding of manner serves as a basis for describing early infant speech of articulation in the pharynx (within the laryngeal and for positing how speech sounds evolving in mechanism) appears to be a prerequisite for various hominids may be related phonetically. To expanding articulatory control into the oral vocal this end, we offer some suggestions for how the tract. Taking the larynx/pharynx as a starting point evolution and development of vocal tract anatomy for the ontogenetic learning of the speech production fit with our infant speech acquisition data and capacity is likely to offer productive insights into the discuss the implications this has for explaining phylogenetic development of speech. phonetic learning and for interpreting the biological evolution of the human vocal tract in relation to 2. INFANT SPEECH ACQUISITION speech and speech acquisition. 2.1. Speech begins in the pharynx (with the laryngeal Keywords: laryngeal, larynx, vocal tract anatomy, articulator) infant speech, ontogeny Research into the earliest vocalizations by infants in English, French, Arabic, and Bai (Tibeto-Burman) 1. INTRODUCTION contexts shows that: (1) speech begins in the The ‘laryngeal articulator,’ consisting of the glottal pharynx, (2) the production of vocalic phonation and mechanism, the supraglottic epilaryngeal tube, the of consonantal stricture begins with laryngeally pharyngeal/epiglottal mechanism, and including constricted settings, (3) infants actively explore their three levels of folds – the vocal folds, the ventricular laryngeal phonetic production capacity through folds, and the aryepiglottic folds – is responsible for ‘dynamic alternations’ of paired contrasts, as those the generation of multiple source vibrations and for contrasts are discovered, and (4) infants often the complex modification of the epilaryngeal and generate oral (lingual, labial, etc.) sounds with a pharyngeal resonating chambers that account for a primary laryngeal vocalization which precedes the wide range of contrastive auditory qualities. These oral articulation or is maintained as a coarticulation qualities are observed in a surprisingly large number with the oral sound. Evidence from the Infant of the languages of the world, both linguistically and Speech Acquisition (InSpA) Project [12] illustrates paralinguistically, and they account for sounds instances of systematic ‘phonetic play’ that labelled in the IPA as ‘pharyngeal’ and ‘epiglottal,’ demonstrate how infants acquire basic control over as various phonation types, as tonal register the speech mechanism and the arrays of place and phonatory contrasts, or as vowel harmony secondary manner of articulation within the larynx during their qualities. They reflect an expanding range of what first year of life. have been known as the ‘states