A Study on Perceptual Compensation for /u/-fronting in American English

0. Introduction There is an undeniable link between speech production and speech perception. In running speech, the phonetic form of consonants and vowels varies due to the overlapping of adjacent articulations (coarticulation). However, the listener hears them as if there were no coarticulatory distortions on the segments. The latter phenomenon—perceptual compensation for coarticulation, a type of context effect whereby a listener’s perception of speech segments is influenced by surrounding sounds so as to ‘undo’ coarticulation—is the topic of the current study. This phenomenon is similar to constancy in visual perception. Perception of an object’s color, for example, remains constant across illumination types; that is, visual information about object’s color is “corrected” for irrelevant viewing conditions (Yantis 2001: 7). This is an important area of inquiry because of its contributions to the linguistic theories of sound change and theories of speech perception in general. Sound change refers to change in pronunciation norms over time in a speech community, and one major cause for common sound changes is listeners’ misperception of contextually perturbed speech sounds (Ohala 1981, 1993). Since compensation prevents this particular type of misperception, it is an essential component of the theory of sound change. Although much work has been devoted to this topic (see, e.g., Repp 1982; Diehl, Lotto, & Holt 2004 for reviews), exactly how the human auditory system achieves compensation is yet to be fully understood, and more studies are needed to this end. This paper will report one such study, an experimental study on compensation for /u/-fronting in an alveolar context.