UC Berkeley Phonology Lab Annual Report (2010) A production study on controlled coarticulation: a case of contextual fronting of /u/ in American English * Reiko Kataoka Department of Linguistics, University of California at Berkeley, 1203 Dwinelle Hall, Berkeley, California 94720-2650 kataoka@berkeley.edu Introduction The study reported in this paper addresses the question of whether in American English fronting of the high back vowel /u/ in alveolar contexts is the result of physical and physiological constraints alone or it is under the speakers‟ deliberate control. If fronting of /u/ is a result of purely biomechanical constraints, then the production of the fronted variant does not require any specification in the input to the motor control system. However, if the fronted variant is produced by the speaker‟s deliberate control over the articulatory sequence of the alveolar consonant and the vowel /u/, then such control requires context-specific target specification for the vowel. What the question asks, then, is this: do speakers maintain two separate articulation targets for fronted and non-fronted variants of /u/? A larger question that motivates the present study is an issue of phonologization (Hyman, 1972, 1975, 1976). Phonologization is a process whereby a speech sound acquires/loses phonetic feature, based on physical and physiological constraints in a given phonetic environment, which is exaggerated to the degree that the feature (or lack of feature) is no longer perceived as induced by the phonetic context but rather independently controlled as a distinctive specification of the sound. It is generally considered that main mechanism of assimilatory sound changes is phonologization of acoustic perturbations that originate in coarticualtion. One assumption underlying the concepts of phonologization is that context-specific speech variation can become a production goal in its own right and thus mentally represented as such. However, exactly what types of coarticulatory variations should be considered as phonologized variations are still open questions. Hyman (2008) discusses two stages of phonologization, as in (1). a. universal phonetics (“automatic”) b. Language-specific phonetics (“speaker-controlled”) c. phonology (“structured”) * This paper is a preliminary draft of Chapter 3 (Production study) of my dissertation “Phonetic and Cognitive Bases of Sound Change.” Minor modifications were made to make this paper a stand-alone version of Chapter 3. I would like to thank Ronald Sprouse for editorial assistance.