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We tested the hypothesis that phonosemantic iconicity––i.e., a motivated resonance of sound and meaning––might not only be found on the level of individual words or entire texts, but also in word combinations such that the meaning of a target word is iconically expressed, or highlighted, in the phonetic properties of its immediate verbal context. To this end, we extracted single lines from German poems that all include a word designating high or low dominance, such as large or small, strong or weak, etc. Based on insights from previous studies, we expected to find more vowels with a relatively short distance between the first two formants (low formant dispersion) in the immediate context of words expressing high physical or social dominance than in the context of words expressing low dominance. Our findings support this hypothesis, suggesting that neighboring words can form iconic dyads in which the meaning of one word is sound-iconically reflected in the phonetic properties of adjacent words. The construct of a contiguity-based phono-semantic iconicity opens many venues for future research well beyond lines extracted from poems.
Reduction in natural speech
(2009)
Natural (conversational) speech, compared to cannonical speech, is earmarked by the tremendous amount of variation that often leads to a massive change in pronunciation. Despite many attempts to explain and theorize the variability in conversational speech, its unique characteristics have not played a significant role in linguistic modeling. One of the reasons for variation in natural speech lies in a tendency of speakers to reduce speech, which may drastically alter the phonetic shape of words. Despite the massive loss of information due to reduction, listeners are often able to understand conversational speech even in the presence of background noise. This dissertation investigates two reduction processes, namely regressive place assimilation across word boundaries, and massive reduction and provides novel data from the analyses of speech corpora combined with experimental results from perception studies to reach a better understanding of how humans handle natural speech. The successes and failures of two models dealing with data from natural speech are presented: The FUL-model (Featurally Underspecified Lexicon, Lahiri & Reetz, 2002), and X-MOD (an episodic model, Johnson, 1997). Based on different assumptions, both models make different predictions for the two types of reduction processes under investigation. This dissertation explores the nature and dynamics of these processes in speech production and discusses its consequences for speech perception. More specifically, data from analyses of running speech are presented investigating the amount of reduction that occurs in naturally spoken German. Concerning production, the corpus analysis of regressive place assimilation reveals that it is not an obligatory process. At the same time, there emerges a clear asymmetry: With only very few exceptions, only [coronal] segments undergo assimilation, [labial] and [dorsal] segments usually do not. Furthermore, there seem to be cases of complete neutralization where the underlying Place of Articulation feature has undergone complete assimilation to the Place of Articulation feature of the upcoming segment. Phonetic analyses further underpin these findings. Concerning deletions and massive reductions, the results clearly indicate that phonological rules in the classical generative tradition are not able to explain the reduction patterns attested in conversational speech. Overall, the analyses of deletion and massive reduction in natural speech did not exhibit clear-cut patterns. For a more in-depth examination of reduction factors, the case of final /t/ deletion is examined by means of a new corpus constructed for this purpose. The analysis of this corpus indicates that although phonological context plays an important role on the deletion of segments (i.e. /t/), this arises in the form of tendencies, not absolute conditions. This is true for other deletion processes, too. Concerning speech perception, a crucial part for both models under investigation (X-MOD and FUL) is how listeners handle reduced speech. Five experiments investigate the way reduced speech is perceived by human listeners. Results from two experiments show that regressive place assimilations can be treated as instances of complete neutralizations by German listeners. Concerning massively reduced words, the outcome of transcription and priming experiments suggest that such words are not acceptable candidates of the intended lexical items for listeners in the absence of their proper phrasal context. Overall, the abstractionist FUL-model is found to be superior in explaining the data. While at first sight, X-MOD deals with the production data more readily, FUL provides a better fit for the perception results. Another important finding concerns the role of phonology and phonetics in general. The results presented in this dissertation make a strong case for models, such as FUL, where phonology and phonetics operate at different levels of the mental lexicon, rather than being integrated into one. The findings suggest that phonetic variation is not part of the representation in the mental lexicon.