Why do some phonological patterns recur across languages, and what can their phonetic and cognitive bases tell us about phonological grammars? This seminar explores how speech perception, articulation, learning, and attention may contribute to shaping phonological patterns. We will examine classic and recent work on phonetically grounded phonology, perceptual and articulatory constraints on contrast, the interaction between prosodic structure and segmental realization, substantive biases in phonological learning, and the mechanisms through which phonetic biases may become phonologized and transmitted over time. A final part of the course will consider how attention and temporal expectations can modulate access to phonological information during online speech perception.
The course is organized around discussion of classic and recent research papers, combining theoretical proposals with experimental evidence from phonetics, psycholinguistics, psychoacoustics, and language learning. Particular attention will be paid to what different kinds of experimental evidence can, and cannot, tell us about phonological representation and grammar.