Phonetic interpretation: Papers in laboratory phonology 6 (review)

This new volume of the ‘Papers in laboratory phonology’ series features a collection of papers presented at the sixth Laboratory Phonology meeting in York in 1998, and published in 2004, five years later. This volume focuses on phonetic interpretation. The term phonetic interpretation has traditionally assumed the conversion of abstract, discrete, and invariant phonological representations to continuous and varying speech signals. A number of papers in the volume furnish evidence that forces us to reassess the nature of phonological representations, as John Coleman rightly points out. The papers show that fine phonetic detail—which traditionally has played no role in phonological distinctions—is used by listeners to identify words (Sarah Hawkins and Noël Nguyen), is used differently in dialects to indicate segmental contrasts (Paul Carter), and is exploited by speakers to identify themselves with a particular social group (Gerald J. Docherty). Consequently, fine-grained phonetic detail must be part of the lexical representation and under the control of the speaker. Other papers in the volume provide evidence on the role of frequency of occurrence (token frequency) on the pronunciation of segments (Richard Wright), and the role of frequency of the pattern in the lexicon (type frequency) on speech perception and on well-formedness judgments (Jennifer Hay, Janet Pierrehumbert, and Mary E. Beckman). These findings on the role of phonetic detail and frequency in speech processing and speech production cannot be accounted for by abstract phonological representations stripped of phonetic detail and suggest probabilistic models of representation of phonological categories such as those put forward by exemplar models or usage-based models (e.g. Johnson 1997, Bybee 2001, Pierrehumbert 2002). If this is so and phonetic variability itself is part of the make-up of the category, the focus of the book should not be on the phonetic interpretation of phonological representations, but rather on how speakers form phonological categories and how phonological categories structure phonetic variation.

The sixteen papers are organized in four thematic sections each followed by a rigorous and comprehensive commentary by a renowned expert. The ‘Introduction’ written by the editors is an excellent review of the aims, practices, and research agenda of laboratory phonology, providing a common conceptual framework for the diverse papers in the volume.

Beckman and Pierrehumbert’s paper provides a background to the first section, ‘Phonological representation and the lexicon’. They review key issues in category formation, the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign, duality of patterning, the organization of the lexicon, and lexical retrieval. They couch these issues in terms of connectionist models (Dell 1988) and usage-based models (Bybee 2000). It is surprising though that they revisit long-standing notions without acknowledging the original authors.

Hawkins and Nguyen present perceptual evidence that phonetic properties of onset /1/ (consonant duration, F0 but not F2 frequency) can be used by speakers to predict the voicing of the coda obstruent in the same syllable (e.g. led vs. let). The two main findings of their study, that phonetic exponents of segmental contrasts can be present in nonadjacent segments and that the listeners show sensitivity to fine-grained acoustic information, lead them to suggest a word-based model of lexical access and that lexical representations must include fine-phonetic detail.

Wright’s paper demonstrates that the pronunciation of individual lexical items is affected by the number and lexical frequency of the word’s lexical neighbors. Thus, words from high-density neighborhoods and with low relative frequency use a more expanded vowel space. The expansion of the vowel space is such that only peripheral vowels—which can move to more extreme positions without diminishing the vowel contrasts—become more dispersed whereas the others remain fairly unchanged. This result is an interesting addition to the literature on the phonetic dimensions that increase (or decrease) perceptual contrast among words...