Broad and fine acoustic categories in bod, bond, bald, and bard: A step toward acoustic phonology

Abstract

Acoustics is central to the study of speech communication, but it is conspicuously under-represented in abstract representations of speech. Many flavors of phonological analysis tend toward articulatory descriptions, and transcriptions focus on strings of articulatory actions. All this is despite acoustics being easier to measure than articulation with current technology. The present study explores basic concepts for an acoustic phonology, with two types of postulated categories: broad and fine. Resonant, turbulent, transient, and occludent types of sounds comprise the broad categories, as general methods of filtering the speech source. Fine categories are conceptualized as specific types of acoustic actions within a broad category. These acoustic actions are goal-oriented, as for achieving a particular acoustic effect like the presence of antiformants or a lowered F2 or F3. However, these actions are not explicitly restricted to manipulating traditional phonetic features like formants. By default, fine categories are assumed to be produced in parallel when possible, yielding overlap effects like anticipatory nasalization, lateralization, and rhotacization. These concepts are explored in a microanalysis of bod, bond, bald, and bard from the speaker in the Massive Auditory Lexical Decision data set, with an eye to seeding the ground for a future acoustic phonology.