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

尽管世界上的语言似乎有无数的差异，但它们都有一个共同点：它们随着时间的推移而不断变化。有时，这些变化会将语言结构的某个元素带到一个意想不到的方向。在这项研究中考察的语言中就是这种情况，腭近音，一种类似于英语单词“you”或“yes”中的“y”的语音，已经开始被读成英语单词“jeans”中的模糊音“j”或英语单词“closure”中的摩擦音“s”。这种变化被称为腭近似值强化，因为取代近似值的闪音和摩擦音需要更多的发音努力，并且在语音信号中产生更多的声学能量。大多数语音变化导致发音的特点是较少的发音努力和较少的声能，因此，腭近似强化是一种意想不到的变化。研究一种跨语言罕见的语音变化类型，如腭近似值强化，为深入了解生理、社会和语言力量提供了一个机会，这些力量共同塑造了个体的交流方式，以及语言如何随着时间的推移而变化。该项目以三个研究问题为指导，这些问题对社会语音学领域及其各种应用（如自然语言处理，法医学等）具有描述性和理论性的重要性：1)在特定语言中发生的腭近似强化的声学剖面是什么？2)哪些语言因素特别影响腭近似强化和更普遍的语音强化？3)由相关语言群体组成的说话人群体的社会矩阵中，腭部近似强化模式是如何形成的？为了解决这些问题，本研究的研究设计集成了从大量不同演讲者样本中收集的实验和会话语音数据的三角声学分析。由此产生的语音数据语料库将通过德克萨斯数据存储库向公众提供，以继续用于学术和行业相关用途。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.