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UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Phonetic Attention and Predictability: How Context Shapes Exemplars and Guides Sound Change Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/10r90282 Author Manker, Jonathan Taylor Publication Date 2017 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Phonetic Attention and Predictability: How Context Shapes Exemplars and Guides Sound Change By Jonathan Taylor Manker A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Keith Johnson, Chair Professor Susan Lin Professor Andrew Garrett Professor Darya Kavitskaya Summer 2017 Phonetic Attention and Predictability: How Context Shapes Exemplars and Guides Sound Change Copyright 2017 by Jonathan Taylor Manker Abstract Phonetic Attention and Predictability: How Context Shapes Exemplars and Guides Sound Change by Jonathan Taylor Manker Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics University of California, Berkeley Professor Keith Johnson, Chair In this dissertation, I investigate how word predictability in context modulates the listener’s attention to phonetic details, and how this in turn affects sound change. Three sets of experiments are designed to investigate these questions: In the first set of experiments, involving discriminability tasks, I demonstrate that (1) contextual predictability affects speech perception, and that listeners attend more to the phonetic details of unpredictable speech. In the second set of experiments I use the phonetic accommodation paradigm to show that (2) the effect of contextual predictability on speech perception in turn affects speech production. This by itself suggests relevance in sound change. In the third set of experiments I apply the model to a specific example of sound change: the reduction of function words. Using an error detection task I show that (3) listeners attend to the details of content words more than function words (with all other variables controlled for) which is linked to their differences in contextual predictability. I then propose a two-step model of sound change involving the propagation of contextually-modulated variation with a perceptual (rather than production) bias followed by the acquisition of new variants. The results build and expand on several strands of literature which have not been fully connected previously. The findings for the effect of predictability on speech perception corroborate a number of past experiments showing that higher level linguistic information can have the effect of aiding speech recognition (Miller, Heise & Lichten 1951, Pollack & Pickett 1963), perceptually restoring missing information (Warren 1970, Marslen-Wilson, & Welsh 1978, Samuel 1981), or generally diverting attention from the raw auditory signal (Cole, Jakimik, & Cooper 1978, Ganong 1980). Additionally, this research considers dual-processing models of speech perception (Norris & Cutler 1979, Lindblom et al. 1995, Hickok and Poeppel 2004, 2007) in a broader context, considering how word predictability and expectancy modulate the type of listening used. The findings also add to the literature on exemplar theory (Johnson 1997, Pierrehumbert 2002, Goldinger 2007), particularly to hybrid models including both abstractions and exemplar clouds within the lexicon. Finally, I propose a new model of perception-based sound change driven by contextual predictability that can account for cross-linguistically common patterns of function word and morpheme reduction (Bell et al. 2001, Jurafsky et al. 2001, Beckman 1998) that does not rely on teleological production-based accounts of reduction (Lindblom 1990, Alyett & Turk 2004). 1 To my family, my parents Donn and Pam Manker and my brother Christopher Manker i Table of Contents Table of Contents ii List of Figures vii List of Tables ix 1 Introduction 1 1.1. Contextual Predictability ...................................................................................1 1.2. Top-down processing .........................................................................................1 1.3. Dual modes of listening .....................................................................................5 1.4. Exemplar theory .................................................................................................7 1.5. The role of perception and production in sound change ....................................10 1.6. Structure of this dissertation ..............................................................................14 2 Speech Perception and Semantic Contextual Predictability 15 2.1. Introduction ........................................................................................................15 2.2. Experiment #2.1: Preceding contextual predictability and phonetic attention ........................................................................................18 2.2.1. Methodology .......................................................................................19 2.2.1.1. Stimuli ..................................................................................19 2.2.1.2. Stimuli manipulation ...........................................................19 2.2.1.3. Procedure and subject groups .............................................20 2.2.1.4. Equipment and subject recruitment ....................................21 2.2.2. Results .................................................................................................22 2.2.2.1. Statistical analysis ................................................................22 2.2.2.2. Results: d’ ...........................................................................23 2.2.2.3. Results: Mixed-effects regression model ............................24 2.3. Experiment #2.2: Subsequent contextual predictability and phonetic attention ........................................................................................25 ii 2.3.1. Methodology .......................................................................................25 2.3.1.1. Stimuli ..................................................................................25 2.3.1.2. Stimuli manipulation ............................................................26 2.3.1.3. Procedure and subject groups ..............................................26 2.3.1.4. Equipment ............................................................................26 2.3.2. Results .................................................................................................26 2.4. Discussion ..........................................................................................................28 3 Phonetic Accommodation and Semantic Contextual Predictability 33 3.1. Introduction ........................................................................................................33 3.2. Background: Phonetic Accommodation ...........................................................34 3.3. Experiment #3.1: Structural Context and Phonetic Attention ...........................37 3.3.1. Purpose and hypothesis .......................................................................37 3.3.2. Method ................................................................................................37 3.3.2.1. Stimuli ..................................................................................37 3.3.2.2. Procedure .............................................................................38 3.3.2.3. Subjects ................................................................................39 3.3.3. Baseline to Immediate Shadowing ......................................................39 3.3.3.1. Measurements ......................................................................39 3.3.3.2. Statistical Analysis ...............................................................40 3.3.3.3. Results ..................................................................................40 3.3.4. Baseline to post-exposure ...................................................................43 3.3.4.1. Results ..................................................................................43 3.3.5. Discussion of experiment #3.1 ............................................................43 3.4. Experiment #3.2: Phonetic accommodation and contextual predictability ......45 3.4.1. Purpose and hypothesis .......................................................................45 3.4.2. Experiment #3.2a: Preceding context ................................................46 3.4.2.1. Method .................................................................................46 3.4.2.1.1. Stimuli ...................................................................46 iii 3.4.2.1.2. Measuring predictability .......................................46 3.4.2.1.3. Procedure and subject groups ...............................47 3.4.2.1.4. Subjects .................................................................48 3.4.2.2. Results ..................................................................................48 3.4.2.2.1. Measurements .......................................................48 3.4.2.2.2. Statistical analysis .................................................49 3.4.2.2.3. VOT: no instruction to imitate ..............................49 3.4.2.2.4. VOT: told to imitate ..............................................50 3.4.2.2.5.
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