This book gathers some contributions from scholars working on the phonetic and phonological causes of sound change. Experimental evidence collected during the last decades calls for the need to build up better models of sound change which incorporate evidence from articulatory strategies, acoustic variation and perceptual categorization mechanisms. The papers collected in this book deal with the explanation of several sound changes, i.e., vowel shift and diphthongization, consonant voicing, assimilation, palatalization, vocalization and retroflexion, and with specific arrangements of places of articulation in sibilant inventories.

Contents:

Silvia Calamai & Irene Ricci, "Speech rate and articulatory patterns in Italian nasal-velar clusters". Chiara Celata, "Rhotic retroflexion in Romance. Acoustic data for an articulation-driven sound change". Juan Felipe García Santos, "Experimental analysis of some acoustically driven phonetic changes in Medieval Spanish". Daniel Recasens & Aina Espinosa, "A perceptual analysis of the articulatory and acoustic factors triggering dark /l/ vocalization". Joaquim Romero & Lucrecia Rallo, "An acoustic study of vowel shift in Majorcan Catalan". Fernando Sánchez Miret, "The effect of word final unstressed high vowels on stressed vowel duration and its consequences for metaphonic diphthongization in Southern Italian". Marzena Żygis, "On changes in Slavic sibilant systems and their perceptual motivation". Kenneth Wireback, "A reexamination of the palatalization of Latin velar + dentoalveolar consonant sequences in the light of phonetic research".