Word-final vowel loss is described as a typical feature of the Micronesian subgroup of Austronesian (Blust 2013), and acoustic reduction of final vowels occurs in all Micronesian languages to some degree (Rehg 1991). Woleaian is one of the few Micronesian languages that retains these vowels, although they reduce in utterance-final position (Mayer 2025). The reduced vowel variants are purported to frequently include silent vowels, a crosslinguistically rare pattern characterized by articulation without an accompanying acoustic signal (Gick et al. 2012). The present study investigates the acoustic and articulatory variation in utterance-final vowels in Woleaian. Participants (n = 6) were recorded producing vowel-final words at the end of carrier sentences, while real-time lip and tongue articulations were tracked using a camera and ultrasound. Target vowel tokens (n = 102) were measured for voicing, intensity, F1, F2, duration, lip pursing, lip lowering, and tongue movement. Results show a wide range of variation in reduced final vowel outcomes. Reduction in quality and/or duration is the most common outcome, followed by devoicing. Silent articulation and vowel deletion occur infrequently (in four and two tokens, respectively, of the present data). The results additionally suggest effects of speaker and word for devoicing and silent vowel articulations.

Austronesian languages have been characterized as having simple syllable structures, despite vowel reduction and deletion (historically and synchronically) across the family [Blust 2013]. Palauan, a Malayo-Polynesian language of the western Pacific, challenges this position, allowing for various typologically rare consonant clusters word-initially [Flora 1974; Josephs 1975]. However, to date, there has been no phonetic study of these clusters. Acoustic evidence of coarticulation with adjacent sounds and resyllabification across the preceding word boundary is observed, suggesting that clusters with different combinations of C1 and C2 exhibit varying degrees of gestural overlap. This study utilizes acoustic and articulatory data to investigate how word-initial bi-consonant clusters are produced in Palauan. Four native speakers of Palauan were recorded reading 26 tokens with word-initial bi-consonant clusters comprising 13 unique C1–C2 combinations. Tokens were read in carrier sentences with vowels and liquids preceding the target. Clusters were coded for place and manner of articulation and tongue movement at three time points. Tongue movement values were plotted for each cluster. Results show that heterogeneity in the place of articulation of C1 and C2 facilitates increased gestural overlap. The findings also suggest that sonorants in the C1 position are more likely to resyllabify to the preceding word.

The Areal Typology of Languages of the Americas (ATLAs) database encodes 265 linguistic features from 17 different featural domains across 220 North and South American languages and 105 languages in the rest of the world. The domains covered in the database were chosen for their regional relevance, and languages were selected on principles of both phylogenetic diversity and geographic coverage. The features of ATLAs are designed to be logically independent, maximizing the reusability of the data for analytical tools which assume logical independence.

Lindblom and Maddieson (1988) observe that “basic” consonants occur in all consonant inventories, but that larger inventories additionally include “elaborated” consonants, which depart from neutral phonation modes, places, and manners of articulation. The hypothesis that larger inventories arise from the smaller ones via sound change is tested here using a database of phonetic processes cataloged from a sample of 81 genealogically diverse languages. The database contains processes that create a large majority of the proposed articulatory elaborations, strongly supporting this hypothesis. We further examine the question of whether the basic consonants are also created by sound change. Our somewhat surprising finding is that certain basic consonants (/p t k b d g m n ŋ s l/) are very rarely created anew, raising questions about how they come to be common in consonant inventories and how they survive processes of sound change and lexical replacement over long periods of time.

Trubetzkoy 1939), its study is still underrepresented in many important venues (Hyman 2007; Hyman and Plank 2018).Therefore, we (Moran and Grossman) organized two conference workshops in 2019 aimed specifically at highlighting current research in phonological typology.The first, entitled 'Phonological (in)stability and language evolution,' took place at the annual meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE), from August 21-24, in Leipzig, Germany.The second, which shares the title with this special volume, was held at the meeting of the Association for Linguistic Typology (ALT), from September 4-6, in Pavia, Italy.The present special issue emerged from these two workshops.Its aims are twofold.First, like those before us (e.g., Hyman and Plank 2018), we aim to raise the profile of phonological typology within typology and beyond.Phonological typology is particularly important for a number of reasons.First, phonology is one of the few domains of language in which we have substantial cross-linguistic data.Second, phonology has traditionally been a testing ground for linguistic theories, including a range of structuralist, generativist, and functionalist or usage-based theories; many concepts first developed for phonology were later expanded to other domains of language, and phonological data have been the basis for diverse perspectives on the relationship between synchrony and diachrony.Third, there is broad agreement among linguists of every persuasion that the sound patterns of languages are ultimately phonetically-based, which means that typological studies can make reference

We advocate for a diachronic typological approach to phonology, arguing that explanation for phonological structure must appeal to dynamic processes. We outline basic assumptions and explanatory mechanisms of this framework and demonstrate its utility by applying it to aspects of consonant phoneme inventory structure. Examining sound change paths through which palatal(ized) and ejective consonants emerge, we show that initial conditions in a language influence the likelihood of a sound change occurring, and that sound change trajectories may differ in their lifespans and the ease with which they are entered into. Regarding more general theoretical issues, we find that focusing on the dynamic processes that create inventories is more likely to produce accurate predictions about the patterns observed than structural generalizations such as feature economy. We conclude that further elucidating the details of sound change will lead to a fuller and more explanatory phonological typology.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.638659.].

Relationships between phonological and morphological complexity have long been proposed in the linguistic literature, with empirical investigations often seeking complexity trade-offs. Positive complexity correlations tend not to be viewed in terms of motivations. We argue that positive complexity correlations can be diachronically well-motivated, emerging from crosslinguistically prevalent processes of language change. We examine the correlation between syllable complexity and morphological synthesis, hypothesizing that the process of grammaticalization motivates a positive relationship between the two features. To test this, we conduct a typological survey of 95 diverse languages and a corpus study of 21 languages with substantive (predominantly >10,000 words) corpora from the DoReCo project. The first study establishes a significant positive correlation between syllable complexity, measured in terms of maximal syllable patterns, and the index of synthesis (morpheme/word ratio). The second study tests the hypothesis that the relationship between syllable complexity and synthesis holds at local (word-initial and word-final) levels and within noun and verb types, as predicted by a grammaticalization account. While the findings of the corpus study are limited in their statistical power, the observed tendencies are consistent with our predictions. This study contributes important findings to the complexity literature, as well as a novel method which incorporates broad typological sampling and deep corpus analysis.

From a usage-based perspective, reduction results from automatization of stored gesture sequences corresponding to words and phrases, which accompanies reuse. In this paper, we discuss the mechanisms of and constraints on automatization, and examine its consequences for vocalic gestures in prosodically weak positions in a typologically and genetically diverse language sample. We show that vowels shorten, devoice, unround, and centralize (with some raising). These kinds of reductions are late-acquired speech patterns which represent highly skilled behavior that results from extensive practice. Reduction is also intricately conditioned by the discourse context. We argue that the leaders of reductive change are adults, who know when and how to reduce in ways sanctioned by the speech community, and have the social cachet to influence other speakers. Reductive change is not due to imperfections in intergenerational transmission. Rather, it is the outcome of lifelong optimization of goal-directed movement patterns constrained by feedback from interlocutors.

Given the common intuition that consonant lenition occurs more often than fortition, we formulate this as a hypothesis, defining these sound change types in terms of decrease or increase in oral constriction. We then test the hypothesis on allophonic processes in a diverse sample of 81 languages. With the hypothesis confirmed, we examine the input and output of such sound changes in terms of manner and place of articulation and find that while decrease in oral constriction (weakening) affects most consonant types, increase in oral constriction (strengthening) is largely restricted to palatal and labial glides. We conclude that strengthening does not appear to be the simple inverse of weakening. In conclusion we suggest some possible avenues for explaining how glide strengthening may result from articulatory production pressures and speculate that strengthening and weakening can be encompassed under a single theory of sound change resulting from the automatization of production.

The relationship between the %V, ΔC, and ΔV metrics of rhythm and the phonological characteristics they are generally believed to relate to is directly investigated. A cross-linguistically diverse sample of languages is examined to determine whether languages which pattern similarly according to phonological features, including range of allowable syllable structure, presence of phonemic vowel length contrast, and presence of vowel reduction, necessarily pattern similarly in their measured %V, ΔC, and ΔV values. Of these features, syllable structure is found to have a significant effect on the indices ΔC and %V and vowel length contrast is found to have a significant effect on the variability index ΔV. Vowel reduction has no significant effect on the metrics.