The Time Course of Individuals' Perception of Coarticulatory Information is Linked to their Production: Implications for Sound Change

Finished · Sound Change

Summary

This paper provided evidence for a link between individuals' perception of sounds and production of those sounds. Specifically, speakers that attend more closely to anticipatory nasal coarticulation as evidence for the upcoming identity of the following consonant (nasal or oral) also tend to produce more anticipatory nasal coarticulation in these contexts. This is not a universal but a statistically significant tendency across speakers. Perception was measured through eye tracking fixations on images of minimal pairs like bet bent.

A key discussion is that different speakers have different planned/grammatical implementations of coarticulation. The paper showed that this corresponds to how heavily the coarticulatory cue to the following consonantal identity is used by a given speaker. Nevertheless, it does not explain the source of the original differences. That is, where did the first speaker's different pattern of coarticulation come from?