Article In:
Diachronica: Online-First Articles

Using acoustic-phonetic simulations to model historical sound change

ORCID logo | University of Oxford,
| University of Oxford,
ORCID logo | University of Oxford,
We introduce a method for investigating sound change using audio proxies and interpolation between them. Using this method leads us to consider the possible trajectories of attested sound changes in acoustic space and allows us to run speech perception experiments with the interpolated sounds to examine the patterning of perceptual judgements. We discuss the implications for understanding rate and magnitude of sound changes and present the approach as one which might fruitfully be applied to a wide range of studies.
Keywords: simulation, sound change, continua, perception, acoustics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Method for simulating sound change
    • 2.1Preliminaries
    • 2.2Speech morphing
  • 3.Example simulations
  • 4.Using audio continua in perception studies
    • 4.1Perception of Old English “breaking” of short vowels
    • 4.2Perception of a prosodic change: Simulation of left-to-right accent shift in Latin
  • 5.Calculating magnitudes and rates of sound changes
  • 6.What may we learn from sound change simulations?
    • 6.1The utility of calculating rates of change
    • 6.2Falsifiability
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
References (47)
References
Anthony, David W. 2007. The horse, the wheel, and language: How Bronze-Age riders from the Eurasian steppes shaped the modern world. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Campbell, Alistair. 1959. Old English grammar. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Chang, Will, Chundra Cathcart, David Hall & Andrew Garrett. 2015. Ancestry-constrained phylogenetic analysis supports the Indo-European steppe hypothesis. Language 91(1). 194–244. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Coleman, John. 2005. Introducing speech and language processing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Coleman, John, John Aston & David Pigole. 2015. Reconstructing the sounds of words from the past. International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS) 181.Google Scholar
Eaton, John W., David Bateman, Søren Hauberg & Rik Wehbring. 2020. GNU Octave version 6.1.0 manual: A high-level interactive language for numerical computations. [URL] (19 July, 2023).
Erro, Daniel, Iñaki Sainz, Ibon Saratxaga, Eva Navas & Inma Hernáez. 2010. MFCC+F0 extraction and waveform reconstruction using HNM: Preliminary results in an HMM-based synthesizer. In Carmen García Mateo, Francisco Campillo Díaz & Francisco Méndez Pazó (eds.), FALA 2010: “VI jornadas en tecnología del habla” & “II Iberian SLTech”: Speech and language technologies for Iberian languages, 29–32.Google Scholar
Fortson, Benjamin W., IV. 2010. Indo-European language and culture: An introduction. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fox, Anthony. 1995. Linguistic reconstruction: An introduction to theory and method. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fry, Dennis B., Arthur S. Abramson, Peter D. Eimas & Alvin M. Liberman. 1962. The identification and discrimination of synthetic vowels. Language and Speech 5(4). 171–189. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Garde, Paul. 1976. Histoire de l’accentuation slave (Collection de Manuels 7:2). Paris: Institut d’Études Slaves.Google Scholar
Heggarty, Paul, Cormac Anderson, Matthew Scarborough, Benedict King, Recmo Bouckaert, Lechosław Jocz, Martin Joachim Kümmel, inter alia & Russell D. Gray. 2023. Language trees with sampled ancestors support a hybrid model for the origin of Indo-European languages. Science 3811(6656). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hermes, Zainab, Marissa Barlaz, Ryan Shosted, Zhi-Pei Liang & Brad Sutton. 2017. Phonetic correlates of pharyngeal and pharyngealized consonants in Saudi, Lebanese, and Jordanian Arabic: An rt-MRI study. In Francisco Lacerda, David House, Mattias Heldner, Joakim Gustafson, Sofia Strömbergsson & Marcin Włodarczak (eds.), 18th annual conference of the International Speech Communication Association (INTERSPEECH 2017), 201–205. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hogg, Richard M. 1992. A grammar of Old English, vol. 1: Phonology. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Howell, Robert B. 1991. Old English breaking and its Germanic analogues (Linguistische Arbeiten 253). Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jacobs, Haike. 2003. The change from left word-edge stress to right word-edge stress. In Maria-Josep Solé, Daniel Recasens & Joaquín Romero (eds.), Proceedings of the 15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS), 71–74. Barcelona: Futurgraphic.Google Scholar
Jakobson, Roman. 1957. Mufaxxama: The ‘emphatic’ phonemes in Arabic. In Ernst Pulgram (ed.), Studies presented to Joshua Whatmough on his sixtieth birthday, 105–115. The Hague: Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kavitskaya, Darya. 2002. Compensatory lengthening: Phonetics, phonology, diachrony. New York: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kroonen, Guus. 2013. Etymological dictionary of Proto-Germanic (Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series 11). Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar
Labov, William. 1981. Resolving the Neogrammarian controversy. Language 57(2). 267–308. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lahiri, Aditi. 2015. Change in word prosody: Stress and quantity. In Patrick Honeybone & Joseph Salmons (eds.), The Oxford handbook of historical phonology, 219–244. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lass, Roger. 1994. Old English: A historical linguistic companion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Laziridis, Iosif, Songül Alpaslan-Roodenberg, Ayşe Acar, Ayşen Açikkol, Anagnostis Agelarakis, Levon Aghikyan, Uğur Ayküz, inter alia & David Reich. 2022. The genetic history of the Southern Arc: A bridge between West Asia and Europe. Science 377(6609). eabm4247. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Liberman, Alvin M., Katherine S. Harris, Howard S. Hoffman & Belver C. Griffith. 1957. The discrimination of speech sounds within and across phoneme boundaries. Journal of Experimental Psychology 54(5). 358–368. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Librado, Pablo, Naveed Khan, Antoine Fages, Mariya A. Kusliy, Tomasz Suchan, Laure Tonasso-Calvière, Stéphanie Schiavinato, inter alia & Ludovic Orlando. 2021. The origins and spread of domestic horses from the Western Eurasian steppes. Nature 5981. 634–640. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lindau, Mona. 1985. The story of /r/. In Victoria A. Fromkin (ed), Phonetic linguistics: Essays in honor of Peter Ladefoged, 157–168. Orlando, FL: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Moore, David R., Joy F. Rosenberg & John S. Coleman. 2005. Discrimination training of phonemic contrasts enhances phonological processing in mainstream school children. Brain and Language 94(1). 72–85. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Moulines, Eric & Francis Charpentier. 1990. Pitch-synchronous waveform processing techniques for text-to-speech synthesis using diphones. Speech Communication 9(5–6). 453–467. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Natvig, David A. 2020. Rhotic underspecification: Deriving variability and arbitrariness through phonological representations. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 5(1). 1–28. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nettle, Daniel. 1999. Is the rate of linguistic change constant? Lingua 108(2–3). 119–136. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nishimura, Kanehiro. 2014. On accent in the Italic languages: Nature, position, and history. Studia Linguistica Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis (SLing) 131(2). 161–192. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ohala, John J. 1989. Sound change is drawn from a pool of synchronic variation. In Leiv E. Breivik & Ernst H. Jahr (eds.), Language change: Contributions to the study of its causes (Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs [TiLSM] 43), 173–198. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pagel, Mark, Quentin D. Atkinson & Andrew Meade. 2007. Frequency of word-use predicts rates of lexical evolution throughout Indo-European history. Nature 4491. 717–720. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Penney, Joshua, Felicity Cox, Kelly Miles & Sallyanne Palethorpe. 2018. Glottalisation as a cue to coda consonant voicing in Australian English. Journal of Phonetics 661. 161–184. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pope, Mildred K. 1934. From Latin to Modern French with especial consideration of Anglo-Norman: Phonology and morphology. Manchester: Manchester University Press.Google Scholar
Rasmussen, Jens E. 1983. Determining Proto-Phonetics by circumstantial evidence: The case of the Indo-European laryngeals. In Fred Karlsson (ed.), Papers from the seventh Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics (SCL), 371–384. Helsinki: University of Helsinki.Google Scholar
Renfrew, Colin. 1987. Archaeology and language: The puzzle of Indo-European origins. London: Jonathan Cape.Google Scholar
Reynolds, Elinor, Paula West & John S. Coleman. 2000. Proto-Indo-European ‘laryngeals’ were vocalic. Diachronica 17(2). 351–387. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rezlescu, Constantin, Iulian Danaila, Alexandru Miron & Ciprian Amariei. 2020. More time for science: Using Testable to create and share behavioral experiments faster, recruit better participants, and engage students in hands-on research. In Beth Louise Parkin (ed.), Real-world applications in cognitive neuroscience (Progress in Brain Research 253), 243–262. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ringe, Don. 2006. From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic: A linguistic history of English (vol. 1). Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sakoe, Hiroaki & Seibi Chiba. 1978. Dynamic programming algorithm optimization for spoken word recognition. IEEE Transactions on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing 26(1). 43–49. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schrijver, Peter. 1995. Studies in British Celtic historical phonology (Leiden Studies in Indo-European 5). Amsterdam: Rodopi. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Skarnitzl, Radek & Anders Eriksson. 2017. The acoustics of word stress in Czech as a function of speaking style. In Francisco Lacerda, David House, Mattias Heldner, Joakim Gustafson, Sofia Strömbergsson & Marcin Włodarczak (eds.), 18th annual conference of the International Speech Communication Association (INTERSPEECH 2017), 3221–3225. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stockwell, Robert P. 2002. Retraction and rounding in Old English breaking. In David Restle & Dietmar Zaefferer (eds.), Sounds and systems: Studies in structure and change: A Festschrift for Theo Vennemann (Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs [TiLSM] 141), 121–137. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Swadesh, Morris. 1955. Towards greater accuracy in lexicostatistic dating. International Journal of American Linguistics 21(2). 121–137. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Xu, Xiaoying, Jianhua Tao, Ling Zhang & Yingchao Lu. 2010. The duration analysis of the checked tones in Cantonese speech. In The proceedings of ISCSLP 2010: The 7th International Symposium on Chinese Spoken Language Processing, 440–445. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zair, Nicholas. 2016. Vowel weakening in the Sabellic languages as language contact. Indogermanische Forschungen 121(1). 295–316. DOI logoGoogle Scholar