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Copyright of Indogermanische Forschungen: Zeitschrift für Indogermanistik und allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Objective: This study investigated the degrees of lenition, or consonantal weakening, in the production of Spanish stop consonants by native English speakers during a study abroad (SA) program. Lenition is a key phonological process in Spanish, where voiced stops (/b/, /d/, /ɡ/) typically weaken to fricatives or approximants in specific phonetic environments. For L2 learners, mastering this subtle process is essential for achieving native-like pronunciation. Methods: To assess the learners' progress in acquiring lenition, we employed Phonet, a deep learning model. Unlike traditional quantitative acoustic methods that focus on measuring the physical properties of speech sounds, Phonet utilizes recurrent neural networks to predict the posterior probabilities of phonological features, particularly sonorant and continuant characteristics, which are central to the lenition process. Results: The results indicated that while learners showed progress in producing the fricative-like variants of lenition during the SA program and understood how to produce lenition in appropriate contexts, the retention of these phonological gains was not sustained after their return. Additionally, unlike native speakers, the learners never fully achieved the approximant-like realization of lenition. Conclusions: These findings underscore the need for sustained exposure and practice beyond the SA experience to ensure the long-term retention of L2 phonological patterns. While SA programs offer valuable opportunities for enhancing L2 pronunciation, they should be supplemented with ongoing support to consolidate and extend the gains achieved during the immersive experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses lenition of lamino-alveolar and apico-alveolar fricative sibilants in Basque in casual conversations between speakers of the variety of Beasain (Central Basque dialect). To describe the phonetic realisation of sibilants, the following measures were used: the proportion of voiced frames, the centre of gravity and relative intensity. Results show that 13% of sibilants can be classified as ‘voiced’ (i.e. they show uninterrupted voicing during the middle 50% of the duration) and another 25% has at least one voiced frame in the middle interval. Several factors were identified as important predictors of voicing: context, speech rate and the presence of the word boundary. It is also shown that voicing lowers the sibilants’ centre of gravity and relative intensity. Finally, the paper discusses potential lexical effects in lenition phenomena.

In this paper, we investigate the phonological and prosodic effects of lenition in Canary Islands Spanish using new methodology. In the course of a motion capture study conducted in the field using an internet camera, we show that lip tracking can help disentangle several problems related to the contexts of stop lenition. First, we show that there is no post-consonantal lenition of stops in the studied variety of Spanish. We also show that the same kind of lenition blocking occurs after a preceding consonant is deleted, which supports containment-based approaches to phonological analysis as well as gestural masking effects. Furthermore, we show that lip aperture, as opposed to acoustic measurements, points to differences between stops produced in focus and non-focus positions, which constitutes an added value in studying lenition. All in all, we show that capturing lip movements is a viable method in investigating consonantal constriction and that studies on the subject would benefit from combining easy-to-use articulation tracking with acoustic analysis.

Our aim in this article is first to contribute to the documentation of the diatopic variation in the realization of Somali geminates, and second to determine whether Djibouti Somali exhibits geminate latency, on a par with Standard Somali (Barillot 2002, Barillot & Ségéral 2005). To this effect, we present the results of two production experiments that were conducted with one Djibouti Somali speaker. Section 1 examines the realization of the contrast /b, d, ɡ/ vs /bb, dd, ɡɡ/ in nouns in Djibouti Somali (Experiment 1-NOUNS) in comparison with the previous experiment we conducted on Standard Somali (Bendjaballah & Le Gac 2021). Based on the results of this experiment, Section 2 addresses the question of geminate latency in Djibouti Somali. 'Latent' geminates are segments that are phonologically long but whose phonetic duration is short. We examine the acoustic realization of voiced singletons (/b, d, ɡ/), voiced geminates (/bb, dd, ɡɡ/) and voiceless geminates (/tt, kk/) in Djibouti Somali (Experiment 2-VERBS). Section 3 concludes the article, and argues in favour of an extension of geminate latency both in Standard Somali and in Djibouti Somali: geminate latency does not only concern the voiceless stops but also the voiced stops. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article has two aims: (1) to survey the main developments of labial fricatives in the history of Frisian; (2) to explain the varied developments of the voiced labial fricative more effectively based on the evidence Old Frisian spellings and reflexes in Modern Frisian dialects. As to the latter aim, it is argued that the currently accepted structural phonological explanation for the emergence of a systematic voicing alternation /f ~ v/ in early Old Frisian is too rigid. In agreement with Theodor Siebs, variable retention and lenition of the voiced bilabial fricative [ β ] presents another way of accounting for many of the Old Frisian spellings and Modern Frisian dialectal forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that alternative methods of data collection are necessary to continue working in certain fields of linguistics. This is a challenge for (socio)phoneticians and phonologists who have to rely on good quality sound but cannot do fieldwork or gather recordings in a traditional manner. In this paper, I show that audio recordings made via social media can help alleviate this problem. To this end, I compared samples from five speakers of dialectal Spanish recorded in a laboratory setting and via a social media application (WhatsApp). The analysis of temporal and spectral characteristics of consonants in postvocalic position shows that recordings made via social media can be successfully used for at least some types of sociophonetic analysis. They also provide some additional advantages for researchers: ease of data collection, potentially large speech corpora, and access to authentic, naturalistic speech which is uninhibited by laboratory conditions or the presence of a researcher and a professional recording device. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A 3D/4D ultrasound analysis of Ukrainian back fricatives provides evidence for onset lenition (debuccalization) and non-markedness reducing place neutralization in the coda (neutralization to the uvular place of articulation). These findings impinge on the role of markedness in predicting synchronic alternations and the direction of sound change. Analyses that rely on markedness as a motivating factor for synchronic patterns of alternations allow for the possibility of coda lenition, but not of onset lenition. However, the analyzed data instantiate debuccalization, a type of lenition, in the onset. Moreover, the observed retraction of place in the coda, resulting in uvular fricatives, is similarly difficult to derive from markedness principles. These findings are not compatible with the view that synchronic alternations must be driven by markedness reduction and suggest that (i) models of synchronic phonology must be designed in such a way as to accommodate segmental alternations that are arbitrary from the point of view of markedness principles, and (ii) reduction of representational complexity cannot be reliably viewed as the driver of neutralization processes.

Copyright of Lletres Asturianes is the property of Academia de la Llingua Asturiana and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Propelled by existing research on stop consonant variability in Spanish, this pilot study provides a preliminary acoustic analysis of stop consonant lenition exhibited by speakers of six different varieties of Spanish in Latin America and Spain to explore the gradient acoustic variability in the production of /ptk/ and /bdɡ/ among speakers of different Spanish varieties. Using the acoustic correlate of relative intensity, this analysis considers the effect of various linguistic factors (phoneme, lexical stress, point of articulation, sonority) as well as the extralinguistic factor of Spanish variety on the production of stop consonants in initial, intervocalic position. Results display a higher degree of weakening among speakers of Peninsular and Insular varieties of Spanish compared with those of Latin-American varieties such as Colombian, Mexican, and Peruvian. These exploratory data support the gradient nature of consonant lenition and provide a baseline for future research on stop consonant variability across the Spanish-speaking world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ambition of this article is to provide a phonological account of an intricate pattern of lenition and gemination in Campidanese Sardinian. The data show two things: that a model of phonology needs some way of showing strength and weakness as positional effects and that neither can be reliably understood in phonetic terms. In this analysis, the discovery procedure does not depend on raw phonetic facts, but rather on a rich model of abstract phonological representations. These representations are of two kinds, melodic and prosodic, and they allow for a substance-free phonological analysis of lenition and fortition in Campidanese that is not confronted by the difficulties inherent in surface-oriented approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Diachronica is the property of John Benjamins Publishing Co. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Spanish voiced stops /b, d, ɡ/ surfaced as fricatives [β, ð, ɣ] in intervocalic position due to a phonological process known as spirantization or, more broadly, lenition. However, conditioned by various factors such as stress, place of articulation, flanking vowel quality, and speaking rate, phonetic studies reveal a great deal of variation and gradience of these surface forms, ranging from fricative-like to approximant-like [ β ⊤ , ð ⊤ , ɣ ⊤ ]. Several acoustic measurements have been used to quantify the degree of lenition, but none is standard. In this study, the posterior probabilities of sonorant and continuant phonological features in a corpus of Argentinian Spanish estimated by a deep learning Phonet model as measures of lenition were compared to traditional acoustic measurements of intensity, duration, and periodicity. When evaluated against known lenition factors: stress, place of articulation, surrounding vowel quality, word status, and speaking rate, the results show that sonorant and continuant posterior probabilities predict lenition patterns that are similar to those predicted by relative acoustic intensity measures and are in the direction expected by the effort-based view of lenition and previous findings. These results suggest that Phonet is a reliable alternative or additional approach to investigate the degree of lenition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Studies in Hispanic & Lusophone Linguistics is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this paper, we present novel data from Spanish spoken on Gran Canaria which show an interaction of two lenition processes: final consonant deletion and vowel apocope. We show that in certain positions in an utterance, these processes optionally combine in a fed counterfeeding interaction. Furthermore, the variation present in the dialect due to process optionality uncovers a latent opacity pattern, i.e. an additional opaque interaction that is not motivated by any individual input-output mapping, but only by the quantitative aspect of variation. This takes the form of mutual counterfeeding, a rarely reported phenomenon, thus creating a novel test case for theories of opacity. The second part of the paper provides a formal analysis of the opacity-ridden data, taking into account process optionality and variation. The theoretical analysis and learning simulations using the Expectation-Driven Learner demonstrate that a probabilistic variant of Serial Markedness Reduction can capture both fed counterfeeding and latent opacity without recourse to additional mechanisms beyond the original framework, as opposed to analyses in other serial frameworks such as OT-CC. Our analysis shows that opacity with optional processes is a complex problem that has to be specifically addressed with probabilistic frameworks.

Copyright of CIRCULO de Linguistica Aplicada a la Comunicacion is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

We review and elaborate an account of consonantal strength that is founded on the model of speech as a modulated carrier signal. The stronger the consonant, the greater the modulation. Unlike approaches based on sonority or articulatory aperture, the account offers a uniform definition of the phonetic effect lenition has on consonants: All types of lenition (such as debuccalisation, spirantisation and vocalisation) reduce the extent to which a consonant modulates the carrier. To demonstrate the quantifiability of this account, we present an analysis of Ibibio, in which we investigate the effects of lenition on the amplitude, periodicity and temporal properties of consonants. We propose a method for integrating these different acoustic dimensions within an overall measure of modulation size. Not only does the modulated-carrier account cover all the classically recognised lenition types, but it also encompasses loss of plosive release in final stops – which, although not traditionally classed as lenition, is clearly related to processes that are. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Voiceless stops in Hawaiian from speakers in the 1970–80s are unaspirated. • The phonetic realization of voice onset time, stop closure duration, and rates of lenition are conditioned by prosodic word (PrWd) position. • The effect of word-internal prosodic structure on phonetic realization is similar to results found for unrelated languages such as Japanese, Huariapano, and Ibibio. • Acoustic cues to prosodic structure may help to disambiguate prosodic parses or to assist with word segmentation. Hawaiian, or 'Ōlelo Hawaiʻi, is an Eastern Polynesian language spoken on the islands of Hawaiʻi. This study examines oral stops in Hawaiian as produced by speakers on the 1970–80s radio program Ka Leo Hawaiʻi, first, to establish whether the voiceless stops of this generation of Hawaiian speakers were aspirated or unaspirated, and second, to determine whether word-level prosodic structure has an effect on either the implementation of voice onset time (VOT) or closure duration, or how often stops are lenited. Hawaiian has only two primary oral stops /p k/ ([t] is a rare variant in these speakers' dialects), and the results indicate that /p/ and /k/ are unaspirated for these speakers. Prosodic influences are examined by coding each stop for lexical word position (initial, medial), prosodic word position (initial, medial) and whether it is in a primary stressed, secondary stressed, or unstressed syllable. Results indicate that prosodic word initial position conditions both longer VOT, closure duration, and fewer lenited productions, separately from lexical word position. Moreover, there is an interaction indicating that word initial position leads to longer VOT in unstressed and secondarily stressed syllables, but not in syllables with primary stress. These results are discussed with respect to the prosodic and phonotactic structure of Hawaiian, which may rely on acoustic cues for the disambiguation of prosodic structure and segmentation of lexical items. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The focus of this article is the origins of (1) reduced vowels in languages of the Balkan Sprachbund, (2) lenition of soft stops, (3) its (pre)nasalization, (4) the change of ‑n‑ into ‑r‑ in the Tosk dialect of Albanian and a similar process in Old Romanian as well as the Istro‑Romanian, Maramuresh and Oltenian dialects of this language, a parallel change of Latin ‑l‑ into ‑r‑ in common Romanian and certain Italian dialects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the Nauruan reflexes of Proto-Micronesian phonemes. Nauruan participates in most reductive sound changes found elsewhere in Micronesian. The attrition patterns of *t and *k in Nauruan resemble similar developments in Eastern Chuukic. An unusual developments are shifts of major place of articulation, from coronal to velar, and from velar to labial. This paper contains a discussion of the reflexes of Proto-Oceanic palatals in Micronesian. A list of Kiribati loans in Nauruan is supplied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the corpus of Gran Canarian Spanish gathered in 2016 in order to provide an in-depth sociolinguistic account of the lenition processes identified in the dialect. After a detailed description of the methodology and database preparation, I present two case studies showcasing the utility of such corpora. First, I show the phonetic and social factors governing the distribution of different surface variants of the underlying coda /s/, pointing to generalised variation and hence incompleteness of any of the weakening options. Second, I provide a comparison of the spontaneous speech produced by the 6 informants of the corpus with their productions from a laboratory study, which leads to the conclusion that variation is subject to yet another important factor: social setting and that the options chosen on each occasion are reflections of competing stages on the same lenition trajectory systematically applied by language users.

Propelled by existing research on stop consonant variability in Spanish, this pilot study provides a preliminary acoustic analysis of stop consonant lenition exhibited by speakers of six different varieties of Spanish in Latin America and Spain to explore the gradient acoustic variability in the production of /ptk/ and /bdɡ/ among speakers of different Spanish varieties. Using the acoustic correlate of relative intensity, this analysis considers the effect of various linguistic factors (phoneme, lexical stress, point of articulation, sonority) as well as the extralinguistic factor of Spanish variety on the production of stop consonants in initial, intervocalic position. Results display a higher degree of weakening among speakers of Peninsular and Insular varieties of Spanish compared with those of Latin-American varieties such as Colombian, Mexican, and Peruvian. These exploratory data support the gradient nature of consonant lenition and provide a baseline for future research on stop consonant variability across the Spanish-speaking world.

This study examines Spanish phonemic stops in the speech of 15 ethnically Bora bilinguals (8 males, 7 females) living in the Peruvian Amazon, within the broader context of examining gender-based phonetic variation in small speech communities. We target pronunciation of intervocalic phonemic /p t k b d g/ extracted from sociolinguistic interviews. The acoustic analysis focuses on consonant duration and relative intensity of each target phoneme. The results reveal clear gender-based variation, with males adopting more lenited variants of certain phonemic stops than females. We discuss these findings in light of gender-based research on phonetic variation in communities undergoing sound change. More generally, our study contributes to the literature on language variation and societal contacts in small speech communities in Amazonia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a preliminary quantitative analysis of (s) variation in Pirahã. Previous research noted a gender difference in (s) use in which women use [h] in environments where men use [s]. Using word list data, we analyze (s) rates among three men and three women. Our results indicate that women do utilize [h] more than men, but neither use one variant categorically. Furthermore, (s) is more phonetically variable, and varies in more environments, than previously described. We argue that (s) is undergoing lenition from [s] to [h], and that this change is led by women. This suggests the "female lead" found in many sound change studies is not restricted to the West. The pattern is even more striking because social and cultural factors operate very differently in the Pirahã context. We evaluate whether current explanations for the female lead in sound change are applicable in Pirahã. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research has seen a surge in interest in the role of theindividual in sound change processes. Do fast speakers have aunique role in sound change processes? Fast speech leads togreater rates of lenition (reduction). But should it mean thatfast talkers would be more likely to lenite even when speak-ing slowly? In two corpus studies we show that even whenfast talkers speak more slowly they are (a) more likely to omitsegments and (b) more likely to perform variable reduction ofconsonants. This draws attention to habitual speech rate as alikely factor in the actuation of lenition processes.

Broad interest in probabilistic aspects of language has reignited debates about a potential delineation between the shape of an abstract grammar and patterns of language in use. A central topic in this debate is the relationship between measures capturing aspects of language use, such as word frequency, and patterns of variation. While it has become common practice to attend to frequency measures in studies of linguistic variation, fundamental questions about exactly what linguistic unit’s frequency it is appropriate to measure in each case, and what this implies about the representations or processing mechanisms at play, remain underexplored. In the present study, we compare how three frequency measures account for variance in Coronal Stop Deletion (CSD) based on large-scale corpus data from Philadelphia English: whole-word frequency, stem frequency, and conditional (whole-word/stem) frequency. While there is an effect of all three measures on CSD outcomes in monomorphemes, the effect of conditional frequency is by far the most robust. Furthermore, only conditional frequency has an effect on CSD rates in -ed suffixed words. Thus, we suggest that frequency effects in CSD are best interpreted in terms of stem-conditional predictability of a suffix or word-edge. These results lend support to the importance of asking these fundamental questions about usage measures, and suggest that contemporary approaches to frequency should take morphological complexity into account.

• The exact phonetic implementation of laryngeal contrast can modulate sound change. • This is true even within 'aspirating' varieties. • Voice onset time and voicing probability systematically covary in Danish dialects. • VOT and voicing in turn covary with historical lenition patterns. This paper provides evidence for the assumption that the precise phonetic implementation of laryngeal contrast in obstruents can have an influence on higher order linguistic structure. Traditional varieties of Jutland Danish – which are all broadly 'aspirating' varieties – are used as a case study. The paper shows that the precise implementation of the aspirated–unaspirated contrast in stops varied systematically in these varieties, and that this covaries with the morphophonological process of stop gradation. Stop gradation is a lenition process which is historically found in the entire Danish-speaking area, but with quite varying outcomes, which were mapped extensively by dialectologists more than a century ago. Using a large legacy corpus of sociolinguistic interviews from the 1970s, this study shows that more sonorous outcomes of stop gradation covary with higher rates of continuous closure voicing in /b d g/ and shorter aspiration in /p t k/, and vice versa for less sonorous outcomes of stop gradation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research on /s/ weakening in Spanish has consistently aligned with Labovian principles: women prefer the prestige variant, usually [s], while men favor nonstandard, lenited variants. However, in Salvadoran Spanish—a dialect that weakens /s/ across syllable positions and shows allophonic variation beyond the tripartite paradigm of [s]/[h]/[∅]—gender-based lenition patterns contradict this generalization. This study examines the production of phonological /s/ by 72 Salvadorans balanced for region, urbanicity, age, and gender who participated in sociolinguistic interviews in El Salvador in 2015. We find that women not only lenite /s/ at higher rates than men overall, but also produce significantly more of the variants that carry the most local stigma. We further find that, counterintuitively, women are significantly more likely than men to lenite /s/ in utterance- and word-initial prosodic positions, which are stronger and more perceptually salient than medial and final tokens. We argue that these discrepancies are best understood by taking El Salvador's unique historical and sociopolitical context into account. Specifically, we propose that a culture of state-sanctioned violence against women and the unprecedented threat of gangs in El Salvador have led to the social segregation and linguistic isolation of women, affording them little access to standard linguistic forms even as globalization, urbanization, industrialization, and migration facilitate a shift toward linguistic standardization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies of the phonetics of Danish stops have neglected closure voicing. Danish is an aspiration language, but the aspirated stops /p t k/ are produced with shorter closure duration and less articulatory effort than the unaspirated stops /b d ɡ/. Furthermore, all Danish stops are characterized by some degree of glottal spreading during the closure. In this study, we use a corpus of Danish spontaneous speech (DanPASS) to investigate the intervocalic voicing—its distribution across the two laryngeal categories, whether it patterns as a lenition phenomenon, and whether the aerodynamic environment predicts its distribution. We find that intervocalic voicing is not the norm for either set of stops and is particularly rare in /p t k/. Voiced tokens are mostly found in environments associated with lenition. We suggest that the glottal spreading gesture found in all Danish stops is a phonological mechanism blocking voicing, which is probabilistically lost in spontaneous speech. This predicts our results better than relying on laryngeal features like [voice] or [spread glottis]. The study fills a gap in our knowledge of Danish phonetics and phonology, and is also one of the most extensive corpus studies of intervocalic stop voicing in an ‘aspiration language.’

Copyright of Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai, Philologia is the property of Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In the present research, the lenition of stop consonants in Persian continuous speech has been investigated within the framework of laboratory phonology. Data were designed such that Persian stops were placed in three different consonantal positions, namely word initial, intervocalic word medial, and word final. Also, the stop consonants differed with respect to context (voiced vs. voiceless) as well as lexical stress (stressed vs. unstressed). Duration of stop consonants as well as their frequency of occurrence as stops, fricatives and approximants were computed. Results showed that voiceless stops resist lenition and do not lose their phonetic quality in any context. However, voiced stops show different magnitude of consonantal reduction depending on word position and context. This finding is in line with the phonetic approach to lenition, supporting the articulatory mechanisms underlying consonantal weakening, namely greater sonority, lesser articulatory effort and shortening. The results further agree with perceptual constraints underlying consonantal lenition which assume that stop consonants are more likely to be weakened inside a prosodic unit like a word rather than at its edges, also in intervocalic position, as they are surrounded with more sonorant sounds, and they are more likely to turn into approximants than fricatives.

Spanish voiced stops /b, d, ɡ/ surfaced as fricatives [β, ð, ɣ] in intervocalic position due to a phonological process known as spirantization or, more broadly, lenition. However, conditioned by various factors such as stress, place of articulation, flanking vowel quality, and speaking rate, phonetic studies reveal a great deal of variation and gradience of these surface forms, ranging from fricative-like to approximant-like [β⊤, ð⊤, ɣ⊤]. Several acoustic measurements have been used to quantify the degree of lenition, but none is standard. In this study, the posterior probabilities of sonorant and continuant phonological features in a corpus of Argentinian Spanish estimated by a deep learning Phonet model as measures of lenition were compared to traditional acoustic measurements of intensity, duration, and periodicity. When evaluated against known lenition factors: stress, place of articulation, surrounding vowel quality, word status, and speaking rate, the results show that sonorant and continuant posterior probabilities predict lenition patterns that are similar to those predicted by relative acoustic intensity measures and are in the direction expected by the effort-based view of lenition and previous findings. These results suggest that Phonet is a reliable alternative or additional approach to investigate the degree of lenition.

The aim of the paper is to present a thorough description of the terms weakening and lenition in the context of language change, and to present major theories of lenition proposed in the framework of generative phonology. Among the most recent theories of lenition, we mention the proposal by Katz (2016) based on Kingston (2008) in which a distinction is made between loss and continuity lenition. We then present empirical data from the Canary Islands dialect of Spanish in which both types of lenition can be found, making the dialect a model example of weakening language change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The set of consonants /b m y/ and historical *w in the Central and Eastern varieties of the Modern South Arabian language, Shehret (Jibbali), pattern together phonologically in the following ways: all are subject to intervocalic elision; between underlying /e/~/i/ and a stressed mid vowel, /b/ patterns with /m/ in being realised as [y]~[əy] in a range of words; /y/ is the reflex of historical *b in a closed set of lexemes; and /b/ realises historical *w, rarely *y, in pre- and post-consonantal position and in a handful of lexemes word-initially. Phonological interest in the set, /b m y/ *w, lies in the fact that the member consonants form a phonetically "unnatural" class (Mielke 2008): they do not include all and only labial consonants (lacking /f/, including /y/) nor all and only sonorants (lacking /l n r/, including /b/), including /b/), and two members of the set, /b y/, share no phonetic characteristics beyond 'voice.' Moreover, it is rare cross-linguistically for one obstruent to be subject to intervocalic elision to the exclusion of all other obstruents of that phonological class. Phonetically "unnatural" classes such as this are far from uncommon cross-linguistically (Mielke 2008), however; within Mielke's (2008) Emergent Feature Theory, they can be accounted for by the pressures of phonetics and "external" factors. In this paper, we consider the patterning of /b m y/ *w, examine phonetic reasons for the inclusion of the plosive, /b/, in this set, and, based on Emergent Feature Theory, present a phonological account of the patterning of /b m y/ and *w. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article scrutinises several vowel reduction and lenition phenomena by employing a model of syntax-like structural representations, i.e. Government Phonology 2.0. In contrast to the standard GP model, whereby lenition and vowel reduction can be viewed as shortening, element suppression or status switching, the structural approach employs the procedure of tree pruning with a heavily limited role of melodic annotation. This paper will take a closer look at node removal with special attention to its trajectory. In particular, two basic directionalities are considered: top-down and bottom-up. The former has been proposed to account for vowel reduction whereby the highest positions are deleted retaining the head and potentially its sister. The acquisition of plosives and fricatives points to the latter trajectory, which disposes of nodes closer to the head. However, the choice of positions that are targeted in weak contexts might be also related to the inherently encoded hierarchy of terminal nodes within the constituents in question.

This article describes the phenomena of sound changes, i.e., changes of single segmental sound of consonants, found in cognates shared by Indonesian and Palembang Malay. A list containing 2,535 cognates shared by Indonesian and Palembang Malay becomes the corpus. Since Indonesian is a modern language derived from Standard Malay, it becomes the reference language in the efforts of descriptions. Consonant strengthening, fortition, consonant weakening, lenition, and glottalization become the phenomena found in the consonant changes. Various syllabic structures in which the consonants distributed are also described. The differences of productivity of certain consonant-changes compared to others are found. The productivity shows that, compared to Indonesian, the occurrences of weaker consonants lenis consonants are more productive in Palembang Malay. Abstrak Artikel ini membahas gejala penggantian bunyi, yakni penggantian bunyi-segmental konsonan tunggal, yang didapati dalam kognat atau kata seasal yang dimiliki bersama oleh bahasa Indonesia dan bahasa Melayu Palembang. Sebuah daftar yang memuat 2.535 kognat dalam bahasa Indonesia dan bahasa Melayu Palembang menjadi korpus. Karena merupakan bahasa modern yang terderivasi dari bahasa Melayu Baku, bahasa Indonesia menjadi bahasa acuan dalam pembahasan. Penguatan konsonan, fortisi, pelemahan konsonan, lenisi, dan glotalisasi menjadi gejala yang didapati dalam penggantian konsonan. Struktur suku kata yang di dalamnya konsonan tersebut di atas terdistribusi juga dibahas. Didapati perbedaan produktivitas gejala penggantian konsonan tertentu dibandingkan dengan gejala yang lain. Produktivitas itu menunjukkan bahwa jika dibandingkan dengan bahasa Indonesia, kehadiran konsonan lemah atau konsonan lenis lebih produktif dalam bahasa Melayu Palembang.

This article examines the lenition patterns of post-vocalic /p t k/ in Eastern Andalusian Spanish (EAS). Twelve speakers completed a semi-directed interview from which a total of 2,400 instances of /p t k/ were extracted and analyzed. Three acoustic correlates were taken from each token: closure duration, intensity measurements, and voicing. The results indicate that more than half of the tokens were produced with, at least, partial voicing. The results also suggest that /p t k/ lenition occurs across word boundaries and is strongly conditioned by phonetic context, speech rate, and lexical stress. This study has significant implications for the study of sound change and language variation which are discussed in this article.

The article concerns some developments of Element Theory that extend X-bar theory to the realm of phonology in order to represent the internal structure of segments. While maintaining some fundamental assumptions of Element Theory concerning the nature of melodic primes, these models propose a radically different conception of the segment and of larger phonological domains compared to autosegmentalist approaches. The article discusses some issues emerging from the adoption of X-bar theory and notation with regard to the representation of lenition phenomena, and suggests that the complex hierarchical structure that according to these theories corresponds to a segment poses problems of descriptive adequacy and raises a general question about learnability.

The current study aims at investigating the manifestations of lenition in Ilami dialect of Kurdish based on optimality theory. The study was conducted in a descriptive-analytical method and the data were collected through a survey while recording the daily speech of speakers living in Ilam and were finally analyzed according to the linguistic intuition of one of the writers as a native speaker of the dialect studied. The analysis of the data shows that the vocalization of [b, d, g] is applied respectively through the processes of consonant approximation, deletion of stem vowel, deletion of prefix vowel, and finally conversion of the consonant into a vowel. Moreover, it has been revealed that vocalization is applied only in morphophonemic environments and in phonemic ones only the first process, namely consonant approximation, is applied. The findings also show that in explaining those processes having phonemic alternations and applied in several passes, serial model is of more efficacy than the parallel one since the former depicts the intermediate levels and the morphophonemic developments of the words in a step-to-step manner.

This article describes the type of phonological changes in Arabic everyday language pattern of Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The data collection was done by interview using Swadesh vocabulary as a guide. Each vocabulary was recorded and transcribed phonetically. From the comparison of sounds and phonemes forming vocabulary in both languages, known sound-changes of sound are classified, namely: (1) referential, (2) articulatory phonetics, (3) translational, (4) orthographic, (5) the tools of speech. Similarity technique is used to see similarities and differences. The results showed that everyday language pattern of Egypt and Saudi Arabia has a lot of phonological variation in the form of (a) lenition (b) deletion, (c) the addition of sound. The sound addition includes the addition of a consonant and vowel at the beginning, middle, and the end of the word. Sound deletion occurs at the beginning, in the middle and at the end of the word.

The present article deals with the description and explanation of some of the most important productive phonological processes in Sonqor kolyaee Kurdish dialect. Deletion, Insertion, Lenition, Metathesis, Compensatory Lengthening, Insertion and Convert /n to /ɫ/ are the processes analyzed using evidence from this dialect. For this purpose, interviews were carried out with ten native informants in different age groups. Moreover, one of the co-authors was the informant of this dialect. Data were transcribed based on the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Examined processes indicated the occurrence of several simultaneous phonetic processes in some of the words in this dialect. In addition, Deletion and Lenition were the most frequent processes and Metathesis was least frequent. Initial cluster of two consonants were common in this dialect which had w or y as the second consonant. In adition to Kurdish dialect of Mahabad (Karimidustan, 2002), the syllabic structure CVCCC is also common in Kurdish dialect of Sonqor kolyaee

The article scrutinises several vowel reduction and lenition phenomena by employing a model of syntax-like structural representations, i.e. Government Phonology 2.0. In contrast to the standard GP model, whereby lenition and vowel reduction can be viewed as shortening, element suppression or status switching, the structural approach employs the procedure of tree pruning with a heavily limited role of melodic annotation. This paper will take a closer look at node removal with special attention to its trajectory. In particular, two basic directionalities are considered: top-down and bottom-up. The former has been proposed to account for vowel reduction whereby the highest positions are deleted retaining the head and potentially its sister. The acquisition of plosives and fricatives points to the latter trajectory, which disposes of nodes closer to the head. However, the choice of positions that are targeted in weak contexts might be also related to the inherently encoded hierarchy of terminal nodes within the constituents in question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A field-based ultrasound and acoustic study of Iwaidja, an endangered Australian Aboriginal language, investigates the phonetic identity of nonnasal velar consonants in intervocalic position, where past work has proposed a [+continuant] vs. [-continuant] phonemic contrast. We analyze the putative contrast within a continuous phonetic space, defined by both acoustic and articulatory parameters, and find gradient variation: from more consonantal realizations, such as [?], to more vocalic realizations, such as [a]. The distribution of realizations across lexical items and speakers does not support the proposed phonemic contrast. This case illustrates how lenition that is both phonetically gradient and variable across speakers and words can give the illusion of a contextually restricted phonemic contrast. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spanish voiced obstruents are traditionally described as having a stop allophone [b, d, g] and a lenited allophone [β, ð, ɣ]. Despite this binary classification, acoustic data has shown that this variation is continuous or gradient depending on the preceding linguistic context. The goal of this paper is to investigate how the following linguistic context affects the degree of Spanish voiced obstruent lenition. Specifically, this paper reports an acoustic investigation of Spanish voiced obstruent lenition in onset cluster contexts. Nine native Spanish speakers were recorded reading Spanish-like nonce words that included a singleton voiced obstruent or an onset cluster consisting of a voiced obstruent plus [ɾ] or [l]. The relative intensity and the duration of these segments were measured and compared with linear mixed-effects regressions. In line with past work, the results show that the voiced obstruents are the most lenited in intervocalic contexts. However, Spanish voiced obstruents are significantly less lenited when followed by [ɾ] in a complex onset; when followed by [l] in a complex onset, the degree of lenition is much more variable. These results provide further support for the gradient lenition of Spanish voiced obstruents, rather than a dichotomous distribution of stops versus lenited variants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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