Next meeting (3/13), Jacob Phillips (University of Chicago) will be talking about “Asymmetrical sound change actuation and propagation: Production and perception of /s/-retraction in American English”. Our meeting will take place at the regular time and place on Wednesday from 4-5pm in Cresap 101.

Abstract:
Models of sound change actuation propose that change emerges from both speech production and perception, with potential sources including the persistence and accumulation of short term shifts and/or the failure to compensate for extreme coarticulation. In this talk, I question how context-dependent variation can approach the threshold of a sound change in one phonological environment, but not other similar environments. I examine the production and perception of /s/-retraction in American English, a sound change in progress in which /s/ approaches /sh/ in /str/ clusters (such that street may sound like shtreet), but rarely /spr/ or /skr/ clusters (scream rarely sounds like shcream). I ask whether evidence from imitation, phoneme categorization and eye tracking tasks can shed light on this asymmetrical distribution.