Grant Berry
Amazon

Adapting to change: Cognitive and experiential factors in real-time phonetic drift

Speech processing is both rapid and flexible despite the gradient and noisy nature of linguistic input. While variation in speech input may influence speech output, it does not always do so. Yet, for individuals to adopt structured speech patterns in their community—and for those patterns to evolve over time—some degree of input-driven adaptation is necessary. The ability to contend with and adopt patterns of variation depends on a combination of situational, experiential, and cognitive factors. However, linguists still know little about how these factors must interact to facilitate the adoption and propagation of structured phonological variation. In this talk, I present a series of studies examining the relationship between language experience, cognitive processing, and sensitivity to acoustic change in the adoption of a simulated sound change in a controlled laboratory setting. I discuss these results in the broader context of sound change actuation and propagation, highlighting their implications for our understanding of how linguistic innovations emerge and spread.