Individual Differences in the Adoption of Sound Change.

Cesko C Voeten

doi:10.1177/0023830920959753

Abstract

It is still unclear whether an individual’s adoption of on-going sound change starts in production or in perception, and what the time course of the adoption of sound change is in adult speakers. These issues are investigated by means of a large-scale (106 participants) laboratory study of an on-going vowel shift in Dutch. The shift involves the tense mid vowels /eː,øː,oː/, which are changing into phonologically conditioned upgliding diphthongs, and the original diphthongs /εi,œy,ɔu/, whose nuclei are lowering. These changes are regionally stratified: they have all but completed in the Netherlands, but have not affected the variety of Dutch spoken in neighboring Belgium. The study compares production (word-list reading) and perception (rhyme decision) data from control groups from each country to those of 18 “sociolinguistic migrants”: Belgian individuals who moved to the Netherlands years ago. Data are analyzed using mixed-effects models, considering not just the group level, but also individual differences. Production results show that at the group level, the migrant group is in between the two control groups, but at the individual level it becomes apparent that some migrants have adopted the Netherlandic norms, but others have not. Perception results are similar to the production results at the group level. Individual-level results do not provide a clear picture for the perception data, but the individual differences in perception correlate with those in production. The results agree with and extend previous findings on the role of individual differences in the individual adoption and eventual community propagation of on-going sound change.

Highlights

IntroductionIt has been suggested that sound change originates when there is a mismatch (or “coordination failure”; Bermúdez-Otero, 2007) between a speaker and a listener
1.1 The adoption of sound changeIt has been suggested that sound change originates when there is a mismatch between a speaker and a listener
The standardization has been reverted in this figure, such that the visualized correlations are on the same scale as the original BLUPs and are directly interpretable as relationships between the individual differences in DF1 in production and the log-odds of the diphthong percept in perception

Summary

Introduction

It has been suggested that sound change originates when there is a mismatch (or “coordination failure”; Bermúdez-Otero, 2007) between a speaker and a listener Either they have the same grammar, but one of the pair over- or underapplies rules compensating for intrinsic variation. The prerequisites for a sound change to originate, actuate, and spread are exceedingly rare: one needs a specific type of variation which is conducive to coordination failure at the right place at the right time, one or more specific individuals to initiate a sound change based on this variation, and a specific reception by the speech community (namely one in which the change is copied and again transmitted further). The rarity of this specific combination of individual and community characteristics has been considered both the reason why sound change takes place at all (if such eventualities were commonplace, we would have learned to be robust against them), and is rare to actuate in the first place (Stevens & Harrington, 2014)

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