Abstract

We present a computational model of lenition-based sound change. Speech production targets for constriction degree are modeled by differential equations with a single stable fixed point at the target constriction degree that interact with higher order equations that reflect prosodically conditioned variation. This output is then input to the articulatory-to-acoustic forward map, the quantal nature of which causes continuous variation in constriction degree to result in two outcomes: closure or spirantization. The quantized acoustic outcomes are then used as the input for the language learner, who must recover the produced constriction degree in the ambient language environment to produce the speech unit appropriately. We model this recovery as estimating the parameters of an articulatory distribution that is most likely to have produced the acoustic observations (i.e., the maximum likelihood estimate). In particular, we …

Date

2013

Authors

Benjamin Parrell, Adam Lammert, Shrikanth Narayanan, Louis Goldstein

Journal

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

Volume

134

Issue

5_Supplement

Pages

4167-4167

Publisher

Acoustical Society of America