Sound change and coarticulatory variability involving English /ɹ/
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
English /ɹ/ is known to exhibit covert variability, with tongue postures ranging from bunched to retroflex, as well as various degrees of lip protrusion and compression. Because of its articulatory variability, /ɹ/ is often a focal point for investigating the role of individual variation in change. In the studies reported here, we examine the coarticulatory effects of alveolar obstruents with /ɹ/, presenting data from a collection of sociolinguistic interviews involving 162 English speakers from Raleigh, North Carolina, and a pilot corpus of ultrasound and lip video from 29 additional talkers. These studies reveal a mixture of assimilatory and coarticulatory patterns. For the sound changes in progress (/tɹ/ and /dɹ/ affrication, and /stɹ/ retraction), we find increases over apparent time, but no effect of covert variability in our laboratory data, consisting mostly of younger talkers. When a sound change has already become phonologized to a new phonemic target with a correspondingly different articulatory target, the original variability is obscured. In comparison, post-lexical coarticulation of word-final /s z/ before a word-initial /ɹ/ more closely resembles /s z/ in tongue posture, with an effect of anticipatory lip-rounding that introduces a low-mid frequency spectral peak during the sibilant interval, and greater reduction in the frequency of this peak for talkers who transition more rapidly to the /ɹ/. In order to uncover the role of covert variability in a sound change, we must look to sounds that exhibit synchronically stable articulatory variability.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it