Abstract
This paper presents evidence that spirantization, a cross-linguistically common lenition process, affects English listeners’ ease of segmenting novel “words” in an artificial language. The cross-linguistically common spirantization pattern of initial stops and medial continuants (e.g. [ɡuβa]) results in improved word segmentation compared to the inverse “anti-lenition” pattern of initial continuants and medial stops (e.g. [ɣuba]). The study also tests the effect of obstruent voicing, another common lenition pattern, but finds no significant differences in segmentation performance. There are several points of broader interest in these studies. Most of the phonetic factors influencing word segmentation in past studies have been language-specific and/or prosodic in nature: stress, intonation, final lengthening, etc. Spirantization, while often prosodically conditioned, is different from all of these patterns in that it concerns a segmental alternation. Moreover, the effects reported here are for speakers of a language, American English, that only sporadically displays spirantization, and not in the phonological contexts used in the experiment. This suggests that the results may reflect more general properties of speech perception and word boundary detection, rather than a perceptual processing strategy transferred directly from English. As such, the studies offer partial support for theories of lenition rooted in notions of perceptual-acoustic continuity and disruption.
Highlights
The studies presented here investigate whether two cross-linguistically common lenition patterns have a facilitative effect on word segmentation for speakers of a language that does not display robust versions of these patterns
Given that English-speaking subjects in our experiment showed improved performance with a spirantization pattern but not a voicing one, one obvious hypothesis is that listeners are using their knowledge of English phonetics to guide expectations in these artificial languages
This study finds that English speakers’ performance on a word segmentation task is improved by spirantization patterns in an artificial language, but not by a voicing lenition pattern
Summary
The studies presented here investigate whether two cross-linguistically common lenition patterns have a facilitative effect on word segmentation for speakers of a language that does not display robust versions of these patterns. The term lenition is generally used to refer to phonological patterns characterized by relatively less sonorous segments occurring in word-initial position, and relatively more sonorous segments occurring word-medially. Adult native English listeners, whose language is not generally considered to display robust lenition, are exposed to approximately ten minutes of acoustically continuous, synthesized strings of nonce words that conform either to a lenition pattern or, in another condition, to its inverse, a “language” where the more versus less sonorous segments have swapped position. The question is whether the cross-linguistically common lenition patterns allow these listeners to more readily identify the “words” of the artificial
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