Seminar | Intrinsic vowel effects across the world's languages

Investigations of phonetic variation and universals has historically been limited due to issues in large-scale crosslinguistic data collection, storage and processing. Nevertheless, prior work has established a foundation for defining what might constitute a phonetic universal, often contrasting explanations that attribute universals to automatic, biomechanical consequences of speech articulation against deliberate, speaker-controlled enhancements of phonetic and phonological contrasts. In this talk, I first present recent advances in the development of large-scale crosslinguistic phonetic databases that now enable systematic testing of such hypotheses. I then present two case studies examining “sister effects” of intrinsic vowel f0 and intrinsic vowel duration. These patterns have been frequently noted in the literature but with varying degrees of empirical support. Our findings help fill this empirical gap and also advance a novel theoretical interpretation of their explanation. In particular, the observed effects may best be understood as speaker-controlled outcomes that arise from competing pressures of target uniformity (a principle of economy) and contrast enhancement.