t/d deletion in American English (Gregory, Raymond, Bell, Fossler-Lussier & Jurafsky 1999)
and I, bit more
reduction of Spanish syllable-final /s/ to [h] to Ø (Brown 2009)
¿Cómo es[h]tás[ø] tú? ‘How are you?’
reduction of New Mexican Spanish syllable-initial /s/ to [h] (Brown 2004)
s[h]e ponía a cuidar ‘would take care’
Contextual frequency and phonetic variation
Higher frequency in favoring environment → process more likely to occur
Word-final /s/ voicing in (central) Mexican Spanish
unos[z]amigos ‘some friends’
more likely before voiced consonants: regressive assimilation, cf. PL nos Darka[nɔzdaɾka] ‘Darek’s nose’, facebook[ˈfejzbuk]
words with higher proportion of occurrence before voiced consonants (e.g. debemos ‘we should’) (=higher FFC) voice more often than words with low FFC (e.g. posadas ‘Christmas parties’)
Informativity (=average unpredictability)
Predictability: home course vs. home furnishings
Informativity: scrappy vs. tough
Words predictable from the following word [=in favoring context] are shorter
Are words typically predictable from the following word shorter in all contexts?
I got this kid, used to live right across from my father’s [ˈfaːðəz] gas station. Probably one of the best car [kaː] thieves, you’ve ever [ˈɛvə] known in your [jə] life. He could get in a car [kaː] and steal that car [kaː]faster [ˈfæstə] than you could get in it with your [joə] key. I take him up to Fall River [ˈrɪvə]… And I parked [ˈpaːkt] my car [kaː] in the lot. I said to the kid, “All right cross the street,” I says, “I want a four-door car [foə doə kaː].”
Before consonants [=in favoring context], /r/-vocalization is more likely
Effect of local context
Are words that typically occur before consonants more likely to undergo /r/-vocalization, even before vowels?
No effect of global context
Informativity ✅
Words that are typically unpredictable are longer
/t/-glottaling ✅
Words that are typically followed by consonant-initial words are more likely to undergo t-glottaling
/r/-vocalization ❌
No effect of typically ocurring before consonant-initial words found
Discussion 1/3
Implications for speech production
No place for FFC effect in standard models of speech production
abstract representations
modular
feed-forward
Discussion 2/3
Implications for phonological representations
Perhaps multiple phonetically-rich exemplars of words stored?
