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OCP-Driven variation in American English schwa production

OCP-Driven variation in American English schwa production. Mary Ann Walter MIT. Introduction. Languages often avoid sequences with identical elements in close proximity. This generalization has been expressed in the linguistics literature as the Obligatory Contour Principle , or OCP .

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OCP-Driven variation in American English schwa production

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  1. OCP-Driven variation in American English schwa production Mary Ann Walter MIT

  2. Introduction • Languages often avoid sequences with identical elements in close proximity. • This generalization has been expressed in the linguistics literature as the Obligatory Contour Principle, or OCP. • Its effects may be seen through constraints on underlying representations, triggering alternations, and blocking alternations.

  3. Introduction • Two OCP effects: Epenthesis (English inflectional schwa): pat ~ pats pass ~ passes [pæt] [pæts], *[pætəs] [pæs] [pæsəz], *[pæs:] Antigemination: digibté digbé ‘she/I married’ xararté xararé ‘s/he burned’ • V-deletion except between 2 identical consonants • Claimed not to have a phonetic counterpart (McCarthy 1986, Blevins 2005)

  4. Introduction • Recent work has shown OCP effects that are gradient as well as categorical: • Properties of the lexicon (Frisch 2004; Frisch, Pierrehumbert and Broe 2004; Berkley 2000) • Perception of consonantal place (Coetzee 2005) • Goodness ratings (Berent and Shimron 1997; Berent, Everett and Shimron 2001; Coetzee 2005) • Even phonotactically licit OCP violations have processing effects.

  5. Goal • Determine extent to which phonetic productions in OCP-violating contexts differ from what is otherwise expected. Prediction • Vowels will have longer durations when between identical consonants than non-identical ones.

  6. Exp 1: Method • Subjects (n=9) read aloud the following stimuli from visual presentation in random order in a soundproof booth, in isolation and in a frame sentence. b a b a b o t ee d d ee oo g g oo “Bababot. Do you know what a bababot is?”

  7. Exp 1: Results • Schwa duration is significantly longer when produced between two identical consonants than non-identical ones (RM ANOVA, p<.001). • This asymmetry holds for each individual subject.

  8. Exp 2: Method • Subjects (n=8) read aloud the following stimuli from visual presentation in random order in a soundproof booth, in isolation and in a frame sentence. p a p ee n k k oo l t t “She papeens a lot. She’s a papeener now.”

  9. Exp 2: Results • Again, schwa duration is significantly longer when produced between two identical consonants than non-identical ones (RM ANOVA, p<.001). • Again, the asymmetry is consistent across subjects.

  10. Exp 2: Results • Schwa deletion is quite common between the two voiceless stops of Exp. 2. • Such deletion is significantly positively correlated with being between two identical consonants (Pearson’s correlation coefficient=.07, two-tailed significance p=.058) .

  11. Discussion • An OCP effect on schwa duration is robust and replicable (even in the more prominent word-initial syllable). • Schwas are longer between identical consonants than otherwise. • Similarly, schwas are less likely to be deleted between identical consonants than otherwise.

  12. Conclusions • Even in the absence of categorical or grammaticalized repairs to OCP violations, speakers manipulate low-level acoustic variables in a gradient fashion in order to ameliorate them. • Those documented here are phonetic counterparts to antigemination. • This undermines claims that it is not a true OCP effect, and offers a potential diachronic origin for the phenomenon.

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