Review of Laboratory Phonology 10 |
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EDITORS: Fougeron, Cécile; Kühnert, Barbara; D'Imperio, Mariapaola; Vallée, Nathalie
TITLE: Laboratory Phonology 10
SERIES TITLE: Phonology and Phonetics [PP] 4-4
PUBLISHER: De Gruyter Mouton
YEAR: 2010
J. Kevin Varden, Center for Liberal Arts, Meiji Gakuin University, Tokyo/Yokohama
SUMMARY
This volume consists of ''a selection of the papers and commentaries ...
originally presented'' at the 2006 Laboratory Phonology 10 conference (LabPhon
10) held in Paris. The breadth and depth of the research represented here
reflect the growth of the conference series and LabPhon enterprise from a small
meeting of phoneticians to a diverse group of 240 speech researchers, both
providing a fertile ground for interaction between all disciplines investigating
human speech.
The theme of LabPhon 10 was ''Variation, phonetic detail and phonological
representation'', continuing the theme of the first six papers of the LabPhon 9.
These papers encompass variation within and between languages, in phonological
acquisition, and between ''normal'' and ''disordered'' speech. Accounting for how
listeners quickly access the correct lexeme despite a constantly varied acoustic
speech stream is a core problem of speech recognition and language acquisition,
reflected in other recent volumes (Solé et al. 2007; Cohn et al. 2012).
The volume is divided into 5 sections, each with a discussion paper or two, a
total of 28 papers spanning 792 pages. As with most LabPhon volumes, the list of
contributors is something of a Who's Who of speech research. Each paper contains
its own references. Short reviews of each follow.
SECTION I, “Laboratory phonology: Tenth anniversary session”, has four papers
plus commentary, introducing the series and volume, and providing background on
the LabPhon enterprise and the 10th anniversary conference, as well as extensive
discussion of models of how we acquire, perceive and produce our speech.
Abigail C. Cohn, ''Laboratory Phonology: Past successes and current questions,
challenges, and goals'', discusses a wide range of issues: the questions and
challenges raised by LabPhon; the models and assumptions underpinning the
various frameworks, in particular descriptive vs. explanatory adequacy; issues
related to modularity and avoiding redundancy; and the interplay between
language universals and language acquisition. There is also worthwhile
discussion of the ''perceived cost of redundancy'' (i.e. the belief that
redundancy is bad; all things must be distinctive), as well as the outdated
concept of a strictly binary-branching modeling of grammar.
Dani Byrd & Susie Choi, ''At the juncture of prosody, phonetics and phonology --
The interaction of phrasal and syllable structure in shaping the timing of
consonant gestures'', extend the phonetics/phonology interface to the
phonetics/prosody interface. Working from the knowledge that prosodic structure
can strengthen C gestures, the paper strives to explain how this might be
concretely implemented in the grammar. (See also Hawkins in Part V.) By
examining how prosodic strengthening affects consonant coarticulation, the paper
takes another step closer to a multi-level description interweaving phonetics
and phonology.
Rachid Ridouane, ''Geminates at the junction of phonetics and phonology'',
investigates acoustic and articulatory differences between single Cs, lexical
(underlying) geminates, and derived geminates. Not surprisingly, a sample of 24
languages reveals length as the primary feature distinguishing single Cs from
lexical geminates. Tashlhiyt Berber is then focused on, since it has single Cs,
lexical geminates, geminates derived by morpheme concatenation, and geminates
due to assimilation processes. Again, duration is the primary distinguishing
feature. Additionally, phonetic enhancements of the underlying and assimilatory
geminates are discussed.
Anne Cutler, Frank Eisner, James M. McQueen & Dennis Norris, ''How abstract
phonemic categories are necessary for coping with speaker-related variation'',
support the need for phonological categories to explain how listeners deal with
speaker variation. While many models rely on matching stored memories to
incoming speech, Cutler et al. show this is not possible due to the diversity of
incoming speech that listeners (and especially language learners) must deal
with. The authors claim that a model based on retuning of phonological
categories by the listener is called for, one which can allow rapid
generalization of speech input to other words.
Janet B. Pierrehumbert & Cynthia G. Clopper, ''What is LabPhon? And where is it
going?'', is two papers in one. The first follows the citation trail of 23
LabPhon authors using the ISI Web of Science (WOK 2012), using citation network
diagrams to illustrate the cross-disciplinary fertilization caused by the 5% and
20% most-cited publications. The beneficial impact of LabPhon on speech research
and psychology is obvious. Secondly, the paper discusses the degree of
abstraction necessary to handle complex speech. In the comments on prosodic
strengthening and levels of representation is the intriguing proposal to
represent vowel formants as eigenvectors, directed movement in 3D space (see
also Cohn this volume). They suggest it is the constantly changing vowel
formants that provide the listener with necessary information to determine the
speaker's size, age, gender, dialect or native language, etc., in something akin
to a turbo-charged Motor Theory of Speech Perception (Liberman & Mattingly 1985;
Mattingly & Studdart-Kennedy 1991).
SECTION II, “Variation and language universals”, consists of three papers and a
commentary. The Maddieson and Yu papers deal with covariation of features
involving voice pitch, while the Kreitman paper addresses language typology in
terms of consonant cluster voicing. Blevins ties them together in a wide-ranging
discussion of how the phonetic variation that spurs phonological change is
influenced by both (co)variation and language typology.
Ian Maddieson, ''Variation in co-variation: The search for explanatory
principles'', discusses how covariation of acoustic features (such as high vowels
being produced at a higher voice pitch) strengthens in clear speech and weakens
in reduced speech--for example, the pitch difference between high and low vowels
is greater in clear speech than in reduced speech. The lack of a clear overall
correspondence between the variation of F0 and vowel height for English, Polish
and French speakers in the study indicates the 'phonetic' portion of grammar may
contain a great deal more language- or population-specific information than has
been believed. In short, Maddieson suggests coarticulation effects occur both in
the phonetics and the phonology.
Alan C.L. Yu, ''Tonal effects on perceived vowel duration'', uses English speakers
to test observed co-variation between tone height (high, mid, low) and slope
(rising or falling), and _perceived_ duration of the vowel carrying the tone. Yu
found that, all things being equal, syllables carrying high tones were judged to
be longer than those carrying mid or low tones, even when they were in actuality
the same duration. The results are discussed in terms of proposals for
explaining how such phonetic differences can drive phonological sound change.
Rina Kreitman, ''Mixed voicing word-initial consonant clusters'', examines the
supposedly universal restriction against consonant clusters containing both
[+voice] and [-voice] consonants. It discusses mixed voice clusters in Khasi,
Tsou, and Hebrew (see also Gafos el al. this volume for Moroccan Arabic).
Kreitman uses data from 43 languages (13 language families) to derive an
implicational relation for clusters, with [-voice][-voice] being the most basic.
This is followed by a detailed study of Hebrew since it displays a wide variety
of voicing, place and manner combinations in its cluster inventory. The paper
provides valuable test data for window models of articulatory timing (e.g. Bird
& Choi this volume).
Juliette Blevins, ''Phonetically-based sound patterns: Typological tendencies or
phonological universals?'', moves from discussing possible routes of
speaker-induced phonetic ambiguity and listener-induced phonological change
(e.g. the Meilke et al. paper this volume) to distinguishing typological
tendencies from phonological universals. Blevins presents evidence from several
other languages and comes to the conclusion that Kreitman’s implicational
relation is not validated; she instead suggests Kreitman’s results are better
viewed as phonetically-based typological tendencies. Blevins then discusses
co-variation in the Maddieson and Yu papers, noting that the effect of speaking
style (Maddieson) and listener perception (Yu) are crucial to understanding how
phonetic traits impinge upon universal traits.
SECTION III, “Variation and the emergence of phonology”, contains three papers
plus commentary dealing with issues related to language acquisition. Fikkert
applies underspecification to a child’s developing phonology. Vihman compares
child productions in six different language communities and draws conclusions
about the factors affecting language acquisition. Goldrick and Larson use tongue
twister data with regard to pattern-matching during language acquisition, while
Ramus et al. place all language-related phenomena within the domain of psychology.
Paula Fikkert, ''Developing representations and the emergence of phonology:
Evidence from perception and production'', discusses phonological
underspecification during language acquisition. It provides evidence that
children's early perceptions and productions are underspecified for all but the
central vowel's features, and that children's errors can be attributed to this
sparse feature representation. Interestingly, the children's performance
distinguishing labials and velars from coronals seems to be dependent not only
on the underlying feature representation, but also on which stimuli the children
trained on before the perception tests. The scientist in the crib appears to be
just as busy during testing as when at play. Despite the complexity of the
argumentation, the data would seem to be important for accounting for the
development of children's representations.
Marilyn May Vihman, ''Phonological templates in early words'', provides a
meta-analysis of studies involving 33 children from 6 language populations:
Finnish, French, Italian, Welsh, and both American and British English. The
thorough analysis of early speech samples refreshingly includes IPA
transcriptions. The study focuses on observed variation in individual
productions, use of templatic material, and how children either emulate or adapt
adult productions according to their own abilities (and predilections?). In
addition it discusses the three-way interaction between universal principles of
language acquisition, language exposure effects on both babbling and first word
productions, and individual development from babbling to first words.
Matthew Goldrick & Meredith Larson, ''Constraints on the acquisition of
variation'', discuss how learners create a grammar from the highly variable
speech input. The authors used nonsensical tongue twisters containing /s/ and
/f/ to compare speech error rates in syllable onsets and coda. In general, they
found the more a sound appears in a given syllable position, the more likely
that syllable position is to attract a speech error involving that sound.
However, an /s/ in a syllable onset was almost always moved to a following
syllable’s onset, even when the speech error ''target'' was the coda. The authors
take this to indicate that the intrinsic characteristics of a speech sound (in
this case, the very stable syllable-initial /s/) can also play a role in both
the acquisition of syllable structure and how variation in the speech input is
dealt with.
Franck Ramus, Sharon Peperkamp, Anne Christophe, Charlotte Jacquemot, Sid
Kouider & Emmanuel Dupoux, ''A psycholinguistic perspective on the acquisition of
phonology'', tie this section’s papers to the larger domain of psychology. There
are valuable notes on the states of ''articulatory equipment'' during word
learning, referencing the perception of phonetic details in terms of mirror
neurons (Stamenov & Gallese 2002), and articulatory positions and vectors, an
updated version of the Motor Theory of Speech Perception. We are reminded that
all production and perception take place within the greater realm of
consciousness; therefore the methods used to uncover grammar need to pay
attention to all the levels of consciousness involved.
SECTION IV, “Variation at the crossroad between ''normal'' and ''disordered''
speech”,consists of four papers plus commentary, a total of 145 pages. The
papers cover variability in speech at the border where language production
begins to break down--attempting to explain how ''normal'' variation and
disfluencies seen in everyday speech differ from and compare to severe
disfluencies seen with physiological or neurological disorders.
Grzegorz Dogil, ''Hard-wired phonology: Limits and latitude of phonological
variation in pathological speech'', opens with a discussion of aphasias, and how
they overlap with and deviate from ordered language processing and output within
various neuroimaging models. The paper finishes with discussion of the
connection between ''hard-wired phonology and its neurocognitive bases'',
including the reminder that all phonetic mapping is restricted by the prosodic
and phonotactic regularities of the language. Particularly interesting is the
way aphasiacs access syllable structure and simplify clusters, and how the
perceptual salience of pivots and landmarks (Stevens 2002) affect access. It
would be interesting to tie these insights with the underspecification models
discussed in Fikkert (this volume) to compare the acquisition of syllable
structure and features with aphasiac syllable structure.
Benjamin Munson, Adriane L. Baylis, Miriam O. Krause & Dongsun Yim,
''Representation and access in phonological impairment'', compares the
phonological impairment of a group of American English-speaking children ages 3
to 7 with typically developing children on various picture-naming tasks.
Overall, the phonologically impaired children showed no significant group
differences from the typically developing children in terms of lexical retrieval
or phonological encoding during picture naming. They did, however, show a
comparative inability to learn non-words based on minimal exposure (fast
mapping). It would seem that while they have difficulty encoding acoustic
perceptual information, they are subsequently able to use encoded information to
form robust phonological abstractions which are freely accessible. The
discussion of the lack of syllable onset priming found in their second
experiment again impinges on how children construct these abstractions and the
features used to represent them (see Fikkert, Dogil above).
Timothy Arbisi-Kelmm ''Intonation structure and disfluency detection in
stuttering'', compares disfluencies of 3 English-speaking stutterers
spontaneously describing a picture book with those of 3 matched controls.
Disfluency sites (function words plus following content words) are analyzed in
terms of metrical phonology grids of the entire sentence rather than the local
word-stress location. Results show that stutterers produced more anticipatory
disfluencies at sites of phrasal accent than at sites of word accent, which
supports the contention that speakers have access to prosodic structure ''well
before articulation of the problematic material has ensued'' (p. 425). In
contrast, the controls' disfluencies were attracted primarily to syllable
onsets, suggesting problems with phonological/phonetic encoding.
Karen Croot, Claudia Au & Amy Harper,''Prosodic structure and tongue twister
errors'', also suggest access to basic prosodic structure at the time of
segmental/syllabic encoding, as per Keating & Shattuck-Hufnagel (2002). 40
native English speakers produced word lists with confusable onsets (e.g. 'den,
ton, tuck, dial') first as word lists and then as sentential answers to
questions. Each list had varying prosodic focus; this study is evidently one of
few that have included prosodic effects in analysis of speech errors. Their
results support the ''prosody first'' model of instantiation, with
segmental/syllabic errors occurring after basic prosody is computed. The authors
further suggest that widely-reported word-initial apeech errors are due to
selection of similar but erroneous forms -- in other words, speech errors at the
lexical level, not the phonetic level.
Ray D. Kent, ''Commentary on papers: Variation at the crossroad between normal
and disordered speech'', begins by noting how the papers of this section impinge
on the core issues involved in speech production and perception, specifically
''categorization of speech errors in normal and disordered speech, modeling
serial order in speech production, perceptual representations of speech sounds,
and neural models of speech production''. Also noted is how more obvious
segmental errors might be overshadowing the low-level motor errors that are
often categorized as simple variation (e.g. Goldstein et. al. 2007). There is
also extensive discussion of the various models dealing with serial order in
speech and the interface between perceptual representation and production of speech.
SECTION V, “Phonetic detail, processes and representation”, is the heaviest part
of the volume, in terms of papers and pages: 8 papers plus 2 discussion papers
comprising 310 pages. Many of the themes touched on in the papers above are
covered here as well.
Sarah Hawkins, ''Phonetic variation as communicative system: Perception of the
particular and the abstract'', sets the tone for the section by noting how
phonetic detail (PD) influences every level of spoken communication. The paper
recaps the POLYsystematic Speech Perception model (Hawkins & Smith 2001), where
all levels of production, perception, grammar and memory are linked via a
central prosodic tree. Crucially, ''phonetic information is distributed at all
levels of the structure'', important since any higher-level consideration can
introduce local change (e.g. emphatic stress affecting loudness, duration and
pitch of a vowel in English). Just as importantly, features can map onto nodes
of trees at any level of structure, not just at the level of ''segments''. The
discussion wraps up with the how top-down informational flow of this model can
be represented in terms of neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, and neuroimaging studies.
Mark Pluymaekers, Mirjam Ernestus, R. Harald Baayen & Geert Booij,
''Morphological effects on find phonetic detail: The case of Dutch -igheid'',
discuss words derived with the two variants of the Dutch morphome -igheid, one
containing a morpheme boundary after -ig and one not. Three cases are
distinguished: stemig-heid, stem-igheid, and stem-ig-heid. Corpus analysis of
/xh/ clusters showed significantly longer durations for the form with no
morpheme boundary even though the presence of a morpheme boundary is usually
assumed to add length. Prosodic structure therefore does not always determine
fine PD at the morpheme level; instead, in cases like 'zuinig-heid' where the
word 'zuin' does not exist, the cluster does not add any particularly relevant
information and so can be reduced. The authors therefore suggest the
Morphological Informativeness Hypothesis accounts for the shorter durations
better than the alternative Prosodic Structure Hypothesis.
Tamara Rathcke & Jonathan Harrington, ''The variability of early accent peaks in
Standard German'', investigate three cases of accented vowels: a high tone plus
down-stepped high tone, a high tone plus low tone, and a simplistic high tone.
12 native speakers repeated synthetic repetitions of a sentence where the pitch
level on the accented vowel had been manipulated in a stepwise fashion. They
also rated the sentences on eight pragmatic scales in a perception experiment.
The authors followed this up with an analysis of the Kiel Corpus of Read Speech.
Their results do not support a three-way contrast between the three tones for
Standard German as has been claimed (Grice and Baumann 2002), but rather are due
to ''phonetic, i.e. predictably related'' factors, especially the position in the
prosodic phrase and the amount of segmental/syllabic data between the tones.
Rebecca Scarborough, ''Lexical and contextual predictability: Confluent effects
on the production of vowels'', like Maddieson's paper in Part II, deals with
enhancement or loss of PD of vowels -- in this case vowel duration and relative
location in the language's vowel space. The stimuli were words of varying
predictability due to lexical competitors; e.g., ''nine'' is easier to predict in
''A stitch in time saves nine'' than in ''The number you will hear is nine'' and so
more often highly reduced. Overall, Scarborough found that both words with many
lexical competitors (here, a difference of one phoneme) and those in
non-predictable contexts contained longer and more distinct vowels. Scarborough
concludes that lexical competition at both the phonological and lexical levels
leads to the same hyper-articulatory adjustments. She finishes with extended
discussion of the implications of the study on various models explaining
observed neighborhood effects in speech.
Edward Flemming, ''Modeling listeners: Comments on Plyumaekers et al. and
Scarborough'', starts by noting that although the amount of segmental/syllabic
material encompassed by a tone phrase can easily be understood to affect the
overall pitch contour (Rathcke & Harrington), it is much more surprising to see
non-phonetic effects such as the lexical structure, word frequency, and
neighborhood density just as clearly affecting PD (Pluymaekers et al. and
Scarborough). To explain the effects of such listener-oriented production,
Flemming forwards that listeners use simultaneous top-down and bottom-up
processing of input. The paper also discusses the different predictions made by
assuming whole-word and segment-by-segment (syllable-by-syllable?) monitoring by
listeners.
Maria-Josep Solé & John J. Ohala, ''What is and what is not under the control of
the speaker: Intrinsic vowel duration'', deal with the interaction between
primary (phonological) features and any secondary (phonetic) features
accompanying them. They investigated durational differences of high and low
front vowels in Japanese (where length is phonemically distinctive), American
English (where length enhances the tense/lax contrast) and Catalan (where length
is thought to play no role). Their conclusion is that while in Japanese duration
differences between slower and faster speech are likely due to (uncontrollable)
jaw displacement, in Catalan and American English vowel duration is deliberately
manipulated to enhance vowel contrasts. The authors also suggest the
primary/secondary feature distinction is an oversimplification; it may be more
useful to view features as a set of one or more (consciously) controlled
features and any number of uncontrolled mechanical features.
Adamantios I. Gafos, Philip Hoole, Kevin Roon & Chakir Zeroual, ''Variation in
overlap and phonological grammar in Moroccan Arabic'', study how timing of
articulator movements is stored in the phonology. Two male speakers of Moroccan
Arabic produced words containing two-consonant sequences in word-initial,
-medial and -final positions, both with an intervening ''optional schwa-like
vocoid'' and without. Articulator movements were analyzed within the
''onset-target-release'' model, and compared to data from other languages. The
overall results show that the overlap patterns related to word position
(initial, medial, final) and place of articulation order ([bt] vs. [tb], etc.)
are speaker-specific and therefore under control of the speaker. Overlap
differences due to homorganic vs. heterorganic clusters and homorganic clusters
across affix boundaries are more stable and hence under the control of ''the
grammar''. They also provide clear discussion of how the Obligatory Contour
Principle can be reanalyzed as a prohibition of overlapping identical
articulatory gestures, and how Arabic morphological templates relate to gesture
alignment.
Jeff Mielke, Adam Baker & Diana Archangeli, ''Variability and homogeneity in
American English /ɹ/ allophony and /s/ retraction'', used audio, video and
ultrasound to investigate how a speaker’s pronunciation of /ɹ/ affects their
/s/. First 27 speakers were recorded producing words containing /ɹ/ in syllable-
and word-initial position, alone or in C clusters; syllable-final position,
alone or in clusters; and when pronounced as a syllabic /ɹ/. Results agreed with
other studies in terms of the range of tongue shapes used for /ɹ/. Then the
pronunciation of 20 different speakers was analyzed, focusing on the /s/
palatalization observed in the Eastern U.S. (e.g. ‘strike’ = [∫tɹɑɪk]). While
the discussion is quite technical, the conclusion drawn regarding phonological
change is straightforward and familiar: What likely started out as a
phonetically driven sound change in some speakers' speech (retracted /ɹ/ causing
palatalization of the cluster-initial /s/) has spread throughout the speech
community to even speakers who do not use the same retracted /ɹ/. In the
authors’ words, “speakers may exhibit sound patterns that reflect someone else’s
phonetic motivations”.
Claudia Kuzla, Mirjam Ernestus & Holger Mitterer, ''Compensation for assimilatory
devoicing and prosodic structure in German fricative perception'', examine how
prosodic environment, duration and voicing affect listeners' perception of
underlying fricatives. German has a rule/law/constraint whereby a voiced
obstruent devoices after a voiceless obstruent; e.g. Sand [zɑnt] 'sand' vs. hat
Sand [hɑtsɑnt] 'has sand'. The authors ran studies to see how prosodic
strengthening, fricative duration and fricative voicing influence identification
of [v] and [f] (lexically contrastive) and [z] and [s] (non-lexically
contrastive). The overall conclusion is that listeners not only compensate for
progressive voicing assimilation but can overcompensate. The authors suggest the
overcompensation they found with /z/ could be due to either auditory processing
before the phonology or because a lexical contrast (/v/ and /f/) is extended to
an environment where there is none (/z/ and /s/). Either way, the identity of a
partially (de)voiced fricative is clearly influenced by the prosodic strength of
its environment. Implications for several models of speech recognition are
discussed.
Jean-Luc Schwartz, ''Filling the perceptuo-motor gap'', discusses the connection
between the parts of the brain responsible for perception and to those
responsible for articulation (the motor neurons). In short, if I have understood
S. correctly, when acquiring language we do not just develop brain circuitry to
imitate the articulatory movements of the speakers we are listening to, nor do
we develop circuitry us to imitate the speech sounds we hear, but we also
develop intermediary structures that allow us to emulate the sounds we hear via
movements of our own articulators. S. sums up evidence from the other papers for
connection (or lack thereof) between perception and production. He specifically
takes issue with Solé and Ohala in two respects: the clarity of Solé and Ohala's
claims regarding the link between speech articulation and speech rate is
unclear; and S&H's expectation that vowel height (''formant dispersion'' in the
paper) and duration are inseparable cues.
Most intriguing to me is S.'s discussion of Viviani & Stucchi's (1992) analysis
of handwriting gestures. When an ellipse is drawn, the pen naturally slows down
around the shorter radii. If an onlooker watches a pen drawing an ellipse at
constant speed, they will perceive a slowing down in the shorter radii to match
expectations based on their own experience. Conversely, a circle drawn with the
faster/slower speed profile used for an ellipse results in the circle appearing
elongated to match the observed speed. This speed/gesture relationship has been
shown to hold for other natural gestures, including speech gestures; it appears
that gesture experience and hence expectation extends to all perception. S.
discusses how this mechanism might be used by listeners to overcompensate for
perceived speech gestures while judging speech sounds. It would also seem to
hold fascinating implications for sign language phonology.
EVALUATION
This volume reaches the bar set by previous LabPhon volumes by examining
variation in speech from multiple viewpoints, and will certainly contribute to
the cross-fertilization of disciplines core to the LabPhon enterprise. Although
by nature a diverse collection of papers, volume 10 connects well with both
volume 9 of the series and the Laboratory Phonology journal.
The volume will appeal to speech researchers involved in phonetics and phonology
(and both), but the content crosses over into models of speech perception and
production, language acquisition, and disordered speech. Any psychologist
working on speech-related phenomena should also find plenty of material worth
mining. The potential for further cross-discipline cooperation and fertilization
are great, especially since both theoretical linguists and language educators
are still underrepresented in LabPhon. The papers are a tough read; anyone
cracking open the literature for the first time should be prepared for some
humbling (but rewarding) time on the learning curve.
One quibble is with the sparse subject index, four slim pages containing some
less than helpful entries: The entry for “timing>articulatory timing” is
“31-52'', the entire Byrd & Choi paper, although it is by no means the only one
discussing articulatory timing; the entry for “natural classes” is “12-780”, the
entire volume. The Subject Index is followed by a welcome Language index,
although one might expect the Modern Hebrew and Lai entries to be accompanied by
entries for ‘Hebrew’ and ‘Hakha Lai’, respectively.
The volume contains perhaps surprisingly few typological and grammatical errors
for a multiple-author work of this size, the last two papers containing the
majority of those noticed. (To be fair, those papers are eminently more
intelligible than if I attempted to write in anything other than my native
language.) Noticeable typos include the Unicode character for the Tsou segment
[ɓs] (a voiced bilabial implosive-voiceless alveolar fricative cluster) on
p.172, rendered as [=σ], although it does display correctly in the figure on
p.174. An incorrectly referenced figure label at the bottom of p.297 in the
Goldrick et al. paper caused a double-take (which subsequently brought to
attention the typo in the accompanying figure). Likewise an incorrectly
referenced figure in the Maddieson paper forced a recursion but was readily
deducible. That said, with the possible exception of the index the volume has
been authored, edited and published to the same high standards one would expect
from this series.
In summary, the volume’s overall breadth and scope, as with other LabPhon
volumes, contribute to the further understanding of how our cognitive functions
deal with the planning and perception of speech and further stimulate
cross-discipline fertilization of speech research. This volume, as well as the
other LabPhon volumes and the JALP, are a must-read for anyone actively engaged
in speech research, especially aspiring speech researchers, and a worthwhile
endeavor for any “strict” phonologist or phonetician attempting to broaden their
horizons.
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ABOUT THE REVIEWER
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ABOUT THE REVIEWER:
J. Kevin Varden received his Ph.D. from the University of Washington’s
Dept. of Linguistics in 1998. Although steeped in Generative Phonology,
work on his dissertation on Japanese vowel devoicing led him to Laboratory
Phonology, and there has been no going back. Other current research
interests include the use of technology in teaching and the linguistic
history of the Japanese language. |
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