Doctoral Dissertation Research: Palatal approximant strengthening - social and phonetic aspects of a language change in progress

Despite their seemingly innumerable differences, the languages of the world all share one thing in common: they continuously change over time. Sometimes these changes take an element of a language's structure in an unexpected direction. Such is the case in the language examined in this study, where palatal approximant sounds, a speech sound similar to the "y" in English words such as "you" or "yes", has begun to be pronounced as the affricate "j" in the English word "jeans" or the fricative "s" in the English word "closure".

This change is known as palatal approximant strengthening because the affricate and fricative sounds replacing the approximant require more articulatory effort and produce more acoustic energy in the speech signal. Most phonetic changes result in sounds characterized by less articulatory effort and less acoustic energy, and, thus, palatal approximant strengthening is an unexpected change.

Studying a cross-linguistically rare type of phonetic change like palatal approximant strengthening offers a chance to gain deeper empirical insight into the physiological, social and linguistic forces that conspire to shape how individuals communicate and how languages change over time.

This project is guided by three research questions that are of descriptive and theoretical importance to the field of sociophonetics and its various applications (e.g. natural language processing, forensic science, etc.): 1) What is the acoustic profile of palatal approximant strengthening in particular languages where it occurs? 2) What are the linguistic factors that condition palatal approximant strengthening in particular and phonetic strengthening more generally? and 3) How does palatal approximant strengthening pattern in the social matrix of speaker groups comprising the speech community for the relevant languages? To address these questions, this study's research design integrates a triangulated acoustic analysis of experimental and conversational speech data gathered from a large, diverse sample of speakers.

The resulting corpus of speech data will be made available to the public through the Texas Data Repository for continued scholarly and industry-related use.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.