The Role of Phonation Energy Efficiency in Sound Changes

Phonatory energy efficiency is the idea that speakers tend to prefer voice productions that give a clear acoustic signal for comparatively low physiological and aerodynamic cost. In concrete terms, producing stable voicing requires an appropriate balance of subglottal pressure and airflow, and in many contexts (especially with obstruents like stops and fricatives), that balance is difficult to maintain. This article argues that recurrent sound changes–such as final devoicing, intervocalic lenition, and the emergence of tone or register from laryngeal cues-can be partly understood as outcomes of speakers repeatedly "choosing" (often unconsciously) energetically economical phonation patterns that remain intelligible. The argument is not that efficiency alone causes sound change, but that it supplies a systematic production bias that creates the kinds of variants listeners can later reinterpret and conventionalize. Building on accounts of sound change grounded in phonetic variation and listener parsing (Ohala, 1993) and on typological explanations emphasizing recurrent pathways (Blevins, 2004), the paper offers a simple testable method: identify contexts with high phonatory cost, show that speakers reduce voicing or alter phonation there, and show that listeners can still recover lexical identity via other cues.