Henry and Theresa Biggs Lecture in Linguistics

Abstract:

Phonemic contrasts, like the one between English /b/ and /p/ (as in cab vs. cap), are often lost in certain phonological positions. For example, Russian maintains a contrast between /b/ and /p/ too, except not at the ends of syllables or words. While there is general agreement that positional loss of contrast like this is likely due to phonetic differences between the beginning of syllables/word and the end of them, it's unclear whether this ultimately implicates perception or production of speech sounds. Accounts often refer to perception, perhaps because acoustic and perceptual data are more accessible than production data. In this talk I discuss such a positional asymmetry in Irish Gaelic. Irish maintains a distinction between so-called "slender" (palatalized) consonants and "broad" (velarized) ones, even at the ends of words. But among languages that have a similar contrast, that contrast is more likely to be lost word-finally than word-initially. I'll report on ultrasound data related to the Irish contrast and show that there are differences in production of the contrast in word-initial vs. -final position that can plausibly be linked to the cross-linguistic asymmetry mentioned above. To put it differently, the facts of production allow us to plausibly predict that Irish would lose the contrast word-finally before it would do so word-initially.