Hierarchical Inference in Sound Change: Words, Sounds, and Frequency of Use
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Date
2021-08-12
Authors
Kapatsinski, Vsevolod
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Frontiers in Psychology
Abstract
This paper aims examines the role of hierarchical inference in sound change. Through
hierarchical inference, a language learner can distribute credit for a pronunciation
between the intended phone and the larger units in which it is embedded, such as
triphones, morphemes, words and larger syntactic constructions and collocations. In
this way, hierarchical inference resolves the longstanding debate about the unit of sound
change: it is not necessary for change to affect only sounds, or only words. Instead, both
can be assigned their proper amount of credit for a particular pronunciation of a phone.
Hierarchical inference is shown to generate novel predictions for the emergence of stable
variation. Under standard assumptions about linguistic generalization, it also generates a
counterintuitive prediction of a U-shaped frequency effect in an advanced articulatorilymotivated
sound change. Once the change has progressed far enough for the phone to
become associated with the reduced pronunciation, novel words will be more reduced
than existing words that, for any reason, have become associated with the unreduced
variant. Avoiding this prediction requires learners to not consider novel words to be
representative of the experienced lexicon. Instead, learners should generalize to novel
words from other words that are likely to exhibit similar behavior: rare words, and the
words that occur in similar contexts. Directions for future work are outlined.
Description
23 pages
Keywords
Hierarchical inference, Sound change, Lexical diffusion, Frequency effects, Usage-based phonology
Citation
Kapatsinski V (2021) Hierarchical Inference in Sound Change: Words, Sounds, and Frequency of Use. Front. Psychol. 12:652664. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.652664