Abstract
There is a large body of work in phonetics and phonology demonstrating sources and structure of acoustic variability, showing that variability in speech production is not random. This paper examines the question of how variability itself varies across languages and speakers, arguing that differences in extent of variability are also systematic. A classic hypothesis from Dispersion Theory (Lindblom, 1986) posits a relationship between extent of variability and phoneme inventory size, but this has been shown to be inadequate for predicting differences in phonetic variability. I propose an alternative hypothesis, Contrast-Dependent Variation, which considers cue weight of individual phonetic dimensions rather than size of phonemic inventories. This is applied to a case study of Hindi and American English stops and correctly predicts more variability in English stop closure voicing relative to Hindi, but similar amounts of lag time variability in both languages. In addition to these group-level between- language differences, the results demonstrate how patterns of individual speaker differences are language-specific and conditioned by differences in phonological contrast implementation.
Highlights
It is well-established that phonetic realization of phonological categories is variable both within and between speakers
6.3 Results: Structure in voicing variation 6.3.1 Individual differences There are some individual differences in extent of closure voicing variability in Hindi, but all Hindi speakers consistently fully voice the majority of phonologically voiced stops
The English speaker with the most voicing exhibits a pattern which resembles that of the Hindi speakers—the majority of phonologically voiced stops exhibit full prevoicing
Summary
It is well-established that phonetic realization of phonological categories is variable both within and between speakers. A classic proposal from Lindblom (1986) states that phonetic realization of phones in larger phonemic inventories should exhibit less within-category variation relative to realization of phones in smaller inventories. This proposal is intuitive, but existing studies comparing variability in differently-sized phonemic inventories have largely failed to find unqualified support for the prediction (e.g., Bradlow, 1995). It does not account for the fact that extent of variability can differ across individual speakers and phonetic dimensions (Recasens & Espinosa, 2006), nor does it account for the effects of context and phonological processes (Renwick, 2012). Differences in cue weighting patterns for the same phonological contrast have been observed in production between native speakers of the same language (Shultz, Francis, & Llanos, 2012), native and non-native speakers (Schertz, Cho, Lotto, & Warner, 2015), non-native speakers with different levels of L2 exposure (Kong & Yoon, 2013), and speakers of a language undergoing sound change (Bang, Sonderegger, Kang, Clayards, & Yoon, 2018; Coetzee, Beddor, Shedden, Styler, & Wissing, 2018; Kuang & Cui, 2018)
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