Phones in larger inventories are not (necessarily) less variable

Abstract

It is often assumed that there should be relatively less within-category phonetic variability in production in languages which have larger phonemic inventories (Lindblom, 1986 on Dispersion Theory). Although this hypothesis is intuitive, existing evidence in the literature is mixed and suggests the need to modulate the hypothesis according to phonological context (e.g., Renwick, 2012) and individual cues (Recasens and Espinosa, 2006). In this paper, we examine this prediction using data from sibilant fricatives in French, Polish, and Mandarin. A direct implementation of Lindblom (1986) predicts more variation in French (2 sibilants) relative to Polish and Mandarin (3 sibilants). We obtained data from these languages in a speech production experiment, analyzing within-category variability in sibilant center of gravity and onset of the second formant of the following vowel. We observed no language-specific differences in extent of within-category variability on either phonetic dimension. We did, however, observe systematic individual differences in extent of within-category variability among speakers of the same language, which were correlated with individual differences in production cue weight. We interpret these results as evidence that extent of variation is related to phonological contrast, but contrast must be quantified in terms of cue weight, rather than phoneme inventory size.