LINGUIST List 23.438 Sat Jan 28 2012 Review: Phonology; Phonetics; Cog. Sci.: Clements & Ridouane (2011) Editor for this issue: Joseph Salmons <jsalmonslinguistlist.org> This LINGUIST List issue is a review of a book published by one of our supporting publishers, commissioned by our book review editorial staff. We welcome discussion of this book review on the list, and particularly invite the author(s) or editor(s) of this book to join in. If you are interested in reviewing a book for LINGUIST, look for the most recent posting with the subject "Reviews: AVAILABLE FOR REVIEW", and follow the instructions at the top of the message. You can also contact the book review staff directly. Directory         1.     Andre Zampaulo , Where Do Phonological Features Come From? Message 1: Where Do Phonological Features Come From? Date: 28-Jan-2012 From: Andre Zampaulo <zampaulo.1osu.edu> Subject: Where Do Phonological Features Come From? E-mail this message to a friend Discuss this message Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/22/22-3173.html EDITORS: Clements, G. Nick and Ridouane, Rachid TITLE: Where Do Phonological Features Come From? SUBTITLE: Cognitive, Physical and Developmental Bases of Distinctive Speech Categories SERIES: Language Faculty and Beyond 6 PUBLISHER: John Benjamins YEAR: 2011 André Zampaulo, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, The Ohio State University SUMMARY The edited volume Where Do Phonological Features Come From? presents first an obituary note on the first editor, phonologist G. Nick Clements, and his outstanding contributions to research on phonology and the phonetics-phonology interface. The book is subsequently divided into five parts: Introduction, General and Cognitive Issues, Acoustic and Articulatory Bases of Features, Extracting Features from the Signal and Features in Phonological Development. Part I of Where Do Phonological Features Come From? offers the editors' general overview of the contents of the volume. Since the early groundbreaking works of Jakobson, Fant & Halle (1952) and Chomsky & Halle (1968), research on feature theory has centered on discovering the intrinsic characteristics of sounds that enable speakers to establish phonological contrasts that convey distinct meanings on the lexical, morphological and grammatical levels. The present collection of papers contributes to this search by addressing the mental status of features, their role in speech production and perception, how their physical properties may be measured and what part they play in the development of language. Thus, the answer(s) to the question of 'where do phonological features come from?' speak(s) to the core of how they arise in human oral communication and how speakers cognitively extract, organize and implement them as units within sounds. While these issues are explored from different standpoints -- ranging from general linguistics to phonetics and speech sciences and language acquisition --, the editors are adamant in establishing the principal goal of the volume, which is to provide scholars with the most current state of the research on feature theory. Part II focuses on the general and cognitive issues of distinctive features, going beyond their traditional roles in distinguishing words or defining natural classes of sound patterns. Current investigation of the cognitive status of features offers evidence contrary to the hypothesis that they are stored in speakers' brains as part of a Universal Grammar; rather, the papers in this part of the volume argue that features are learned and language-specific. Abigail C. Cohn investigates the conflict between those two viewpoints in the first paper, "Features, segments, and the sources of phonological primitives," by examining their arguments regarding issues such as the nature of phonological primitives, their phonetic implementation, their occurrence in all human languages and their relation to language acquisition. The author reviews work on distinctive features within classic generative phonology and concludes that it provides imprecise results. Evidence from language-specific phonetics demonstrates certain similarities in the phonetic correlates of features across languages, but at the same time, it also reveals that features do not necessarily establish the same phonological categories cross-linguistically. As for the role of features in language acquisition, Cohn maintains that speakers can learn and establish categorical systems out of more gradient ones. In the second paper, "Feature economy in natural, random, and synthetic inventories," Scott Mackie and Jeff Mielke test Clement's (2003) notion of feature economy (the maximization of the ratio of sounds in an inventory to the features needed to define them) in a large-scale investigation using P-base, a database of inventories and sound patterns of 549 languages. Although the results support Clement's concept of feature economy by suggesting that natural inventories are indeed more economical, they also reveal that features are not necessary for an inventory to incur feature economy effects, as de Boer's (2001) agent-based simulations of vowel inventories without features are also shown to be at least as economical as natural vowel inventories. Part III features three papers which investigate the acoustic and articulatory foundations of distinctive features and present a reflection upon how these phonological units can be abstracted from physical properties. The third paper, entitled "Sound systems are shaped by their users: The recombination of phonetic substance," by Björn Lindblom, Randy Diehl, Sang-Hoon Park and Giampiero Salvi, extends previous research carried out under the framework of dispersion theory, according to which languages tend to favor phoneme inventories that maximize acoustic distinctiveness while minimizing articulatory effort. The authors set out to test the explanatory adequacy of this framework regarding the preference of languages for labial, dental/alveolar and velar places of articulation. Through computational experiments centered on the place of articulation of stop+vowel syllables from diverse language inventories, these authors are able to determine the perceptual cost, the articulatory cost and the mode of learning of features. Subsequently, they apply such constraints to the observed phonetics of stop+vowel inventories and argue that phonological facts are better explained through user-based accounts rather than abstract ones. Hyunsoon Kim presents acoustic, articulatory and aerodynamic data to investigate the phonetic implementation of distinctive features in Korean lenis and fortis fricatives /s, s'/ in the fourth paper, "What features underline the /s/ vs. /s'/ contrast in Korean? Phonetic and phonological evidence." The author argues that these two voiceless segments should be specified for the feature [-spread glottis] regarding the opening of the glottis, while they are different from each other as far as the primary articulator of the tongue blade, i.e. while lenis /s/ is [-tense], fortis /s'/ is [+tense]. The fifth paper, "Automaticity vs. feature-enhancement in the control of segmental F0," by Phil Hoole and Kiyoshi Honda, offers a fine-grained examination of enhancement theory (Stevens & Keyser 2010), which argues that some features can be enhanced by others that are not necessarily phonetically related to them. The authors analyze electromyographic data from the cricothyroid muscle in order to investigate the role played by F0 in the features of voicing and vowel height. Regarding the former, results indicate that the articulation of consonants is what determines the different patterns of F0, and the articulation of vowels establishes their different pitch patterns. Thus, speakers find themselves in control of choosing whether or not to enhance features, which suggests that these do not represent abstract immutable entities. The sixth, seventh and eighth papers, which correspond to Part IV of the volume, are concerned with the extraction of features from the signal and the subsequent categorization of sounds. Diana Archangeli, Adam Baker and Jeff Mielke present three studies regarding the articulation and perception of American English /ɹ/ in the sixth paper, "Categorization and features: Evidence from American English /ɹ/." While the first study explores the different articulations of this sound, the second study assesses its perception by native speakers, and the third evaluates the co-articulatory effects in /str/ clusters. The results indicate that speakers are inclined to categorize sounds and extract sound patterns from the signal, though the latter might not always be clear or consistent. The authors also argue that these results support the hypothesis that features are learned and emergent in the inventory of speakers and rely upon how these parse acoustic data. Thus, this paper presents evidence against the idea that features are innately pre-defined. Bob McMurray, Jennifer S. Cole and Cheyenne Munson contribute the seventh paper, "Features as an emergent product of computing perceptual cues relative to expectations." This paper, too, is concerned with how speakers are able to extract distinctive features from the signal. The authors put forth a model that builds upon earlier proposals (e.g. Fowler 1984; Gow 2003) and make an argument for the idea that the listener, by parsing the data to which s/he is exposed, is then able to filter out the varying character of sound articulation and to utilize it as relevant information. The authors exemplify this model with a case study of vowel-to-vowel co-articulation (V-to-V), which shows that, by parsing the variable acoustic formant measures of vowels, speakers are able to correctly identify vowels and most accurately predict the vowel to appear in the next syllable. In the eighth paper, entitled "Features are phonological transforms of natural boundaries," Willy Serniclaes presents a different view of how speakers categorize sounds and extract distinctive features. The author argues that features are not to be identified at the stable state of the signal, but rather at the boundaries between sounds, such as in vowel formant transitions or stop bursts. Features represent then contrastive units found in the differences between categories. The author supports this approach by providing psychoacoustic evidence for the enhanced auditory sensitivity that characterizes these boundary regions. Moreover, he demonstrates that the perception of vowel and consonant place-of-articulation distinctions coincide after rotation of the acoustic space. This indicates that speakers' place-of-articulation perception acts in accordance with a 'radial' representation of the vocal tract, with psychoacoustic boundaries standing as the central reference point. The relationship between language acquisition and the study of distinctive features is reserved for the final section of the volume (Part V), which includes the last three contributions. In the ninth paper, "Features in child phonology: Inherent, emergent, or artefacts of analysis?," Lise Menn and Marilyn Vihman offer their view on what the actual role distinctive features play in child phonology. In tune with most of the previous papers, the authors argue against the notion that features are innate and universal units present in all children's minds. According to their account, features are instead inherent in the sense that they represent a cohesive system composed of the acoustic-auditory input signal and children's cognitive and articulatory capacities. Features are thus phonetically grounded and emergent during language acquisition, forming part of a child's mental grammar as s/he increases her/his use of the language over time. Alejandrina Cristià, Amanda Seidl and Alexander L. Francis contribute the tenth paper, "Phonological features in infancy," in which they carry out experiments with groups of 7-8-month-old and 14-month-old infants in order to address the availability of features to the young learner and how these features help shape human language. Using the Headturn Preference method, the authors find that when features are grouped into natural classes, they end up helping the learning experience and the creation of sound patterns. Additionally, children are able to identify the operating features in their language when they are between 8 and 14 months old. These results provide evidence that distinctive features emerge from an interaction of cognitive patterns during first language acquisition and are thus not universally innate. In the eleventh and final paper, "Acoustic cues to stop-coda voicing contrasts in the speech of 2-3-year-olds learning American English," Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel, Katherine Demuth, Helen M. Hanson and Kenneth N. Stevens approach the variation in the production and perception of cues by children and the possibly different use of features that they carry out in comparison with adults. By analyzing two children's use of acoustic cues to voicing contrast in word-final stops, the authors find a higher occurrence of epenthetic vowels after voiced rather than voiceless codas, which indicates that a possible lack of total gesture control, planning inability and non-adult patterns of enhancing feature cues by children may still be present in their production of stops, even though adult listeners are able to filter and recognize them as such. EVALUATION The compilation of scholarly work in ''Where Do Phonological Features Come From?'' meets the objective that its editors set out, by establishing where the research on feature theory stands nowadays. Relying on accounts from general linguistics to speech production and perception and language acquisition, its multi-perspective nature renders it one of the richest contributions yet for our understanding of the foundations of distinctive features. For this sole reason, it surely belongs in every phonologist's scholarly collection and research universities' libraries around the world. From the pioneering work of classical generative phonology to more recent publications such as Clements & Hume (1995), Mielke (2008) and Clements (2009), feature theory has always attempted to offer an explanation for the way sounds are extracted from the acoustic signal and how their composing units are organized and stored in the brains of language users, so as to enable inter-speaker oral communication. The present volume speaks to the core of this issue. It provides a solid set of groundbreaking papers of which the underlying thesis builds upon experimental data to reveal that, rather than universally innate, features are emergent and learned through the course of language acquisition, in the interplay between sound articulation and the perception of the acoustic signal. The excellent scientific quality of the volume's papers reveals different directions for further research within the field. The role of distinctive features in sound and language change represents one of the interface areas to which current research on feature theory can contribute and is nonetheless absent in this volume. Assuming that sound variation and change is pervasive and inherent in natural human languages, what actual role do emergent phonological features play in the constant (re)shaping of sound patterns? If features, as the units of which sounds are composed, develop from the phonetics of sound articulation and perception during inter-speaker oral communication, would 'feature change' be a more revealing term than 'sound change'? While research on feature theory continues to advance, it provides us with better tools to understand the components of the linguistic knowledge generated and stored in the brains of language users. The volume under review represents an excellent guide to such tools and the state of our knowledge on these questions today. REFERENCES de Boer, Bart. 2001. The origins of vowel systems. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Clements, G. Nick. 2003. Feature economy in sound systems. Phonology 20:287-333. Clements, G. Nick. 2009. The role of features in speech sound inventories. In E. Raimy & C. Cairns (eds.), Contemporary views on architecture and representations in Phonological Theory, 19-68. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Clements, G. Nick & Elizabeth V. Hume. 1995. The internal organization of speech sounds. In J. Goldsmith (ed.), The Handbook of Phonological Theory, 245-306. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Chomsky, Noam & Morris Halle. 1968. The sound pattern of English. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Fowler, Carol A. 1984. Segmentation of coarticulated speech in perception. Perception & Psychophysics, 36:359-368. Gow, David W. 2003. Feature parsing: Feature cue mapping in spoken word recognition. Perception & Psychophysics, 65:575-590. Jakobson, Roman C., Gunnar M. Fant & Morris Halle. 1952. Preliminaries to speech analysis: The distinctive features and their correlates. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Mielke, Jeff. 2008. The emergence of distinctive features. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stevens, Kenneth & Samuel J. Keyser. 2010. Quantal theory, enhancement, and overlap. Journal of Phonetics 38:10-19. ABOUT THE REVIEWER André Zampaulo is a Ph.D. candidate in Spanish and Portuguese Linguistics at The Ohio State University specializing in phonetics & phonology and language change, with a particular interest in the evolutionary pathways of the Spanish and Portuguese sound systems. He expects to defend his dissertation on the evolution of palatal consonants in those languages by spring 2013. Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue Page Updated: 28-Jan-2012       About LINGUIST    |   Contact Us       While the LINGUIST List makes every effort to ensure the linguistic relevance of sites listed on its pages, it cannot vouch for their contents.