Real-time MRI study demonstrates articulatory timing shifts in American and Southern British English, indicating physiological pathways driving sound change and compensatory vowel lengthening.
A central task in sound change research is to account for the emergence of new phonological categories from patterns of synchronic phonetic variation. To this end, a comparison was made of two English dialects differing in their phonologization of coarticulatory vowel nasalization using real-time magnetic resonance imaging of the velum and tongue and their synchronization with the glottal signal. This was done for coda vowel-nasal (VN) sequences preceding voiced and voiceless stops. The results showed that a later phasing of N’s oral gesture and an earlier onset of aperiodicity in the nasal consonant were two of the main physiological factors likely to lead to sound change in voiceless VNC̥ clusters. They were also consistent with models of compensatory lengthening by which the vowel is lengthened and the oral gesture of the nasal consonant is shortened as sound change progresses.
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Harrington et al. (2025) studied this question.
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