John J Ohala
Biographic Data
| ID | 211512 |
|---|---|
| NAME | John J Ohala |
| GIVEN NAMES | John J |
| FAMILY NAME | Ohala |
| SIGNATURE | OHALA J J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Berkeley |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 34 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 302 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 33 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1975 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
In Memoriam: Ralph L. Vanderslice and Gunnar Fant
RALPH L. VANDERSLICE, who contributed to many areas of phonetics, died on 24 August 2008, aged 78, in Portland, Oregon. He was born on 2 January 1930 in South Bend, Indiana. He received his B.A. and his M.Sc. in speech and theatre from Michigan State College (now Michigan State University) in 1951 and 1954, respectively. He subsequently taught at the Universities of Vermont and Hawai'i. He moved to UCLA where, in 1968, he obtained his Ph.D. His d…
Phonetics in the free market of scientific ideas and results
Klaus Kohler has presented a thoughtful account of the history of the development of phonetics and proposals for the consolidation of phonetics pedagogy (Kohler 2001). As a student of the history of phonetics (Ohala 1992; Ohala, Bronstein, Busa, Lewis, & Weigel 1999) I very much appreciate his contributions
American English and the International Phonetic Alphabet: The International Phonetic Association Reacts
Sound symbolism: The biological bases of sound symbolism
Sound symbolism: Australia and Africa
Sound symbolism is the study of the relationship between the sound of an utterance and its meaning. In this interdisciplinary collection of new studies, twenty-four leading scholars discuss the role of sound symbolism in a theory of language. They consider sound symbolic processes in a wide range of languages from Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and North and South America. Beginning with an evocative typology of sound symbolic processes, they g…
Coarticulation and Phonology
Many sound patterns in languages are cases of fossilized coarticulation, that is, synchronic or phonetic contextual variation became diachronic or phonological variation via sound change. An examination of languages' phonologies can therefore yield insights into the mechanisms of coarticulation. In this paper I discuss (a) the need to differentiate between phonological processes that are and are not due to coarticulation, (b) the need to differen…
Experimental Phonology
There is no interface between phonology and phonetics: A Personal View
Sound change is drawn from a pool of synchronic variation
Experimental Phonology
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1987), pp. 207-222
The Phonetic Basis of Perceptual Ratings of Running Speech
Experimental phonology
Phonological structure in speech recognition
Two bodies of recent research from experimental psycholinguistics are summarised, each of which is centred upon a concept from phonology: LEXICAL STRESS and the SYLLABLE. The evidence indicates that neither construct plays a role in prelexical representations during speech recognition. Both constructs, however, are well supported by other performance evidence. Testing phonological claims against performance evidence from psycholinguistics can be …
Towards an articulatory phonology
We propose an approach to phonological representation based on describing an utterance as an organised pattern of overlapping articulatory gestures. Because movement is inherent in our definition of gestures, these gestural ‘constellations’ can account for both spatial and temporal properties of speech in a relatively simple way. At the same time, taken as phonological representations, such gestural analyses offer many of the same advantages prov…
Consumer's guide to evidence in phonology
The purpose of evidence adduced in support of a theory is not to prove that theory true but to demonstrate that competing theories account for facts less well and thus no longer demand our attention. Evidence therefore, if it can unambiguously decide between competing theories, helps the discipline to spend its resources on only a few issues at a time. I evaluate this winnowing capacity of various kinds of evidence which have been offered in supp…
Perceptual constraints and phonological change: A study of nasal vowel height
To address the claim that listener misperceptions are a source of phonological shifts in nasal vowel height, the phonological, acoustic and perceptual effects of nasalisation on vowel height were examined. We show that the acoustic consequences of nasal coupling, while consistent with phonological patterns of nasal vowel raising and lowering, do not always influence perceived vowel height. The perceptual data suggest that nasalisation affects per…
Cross-linguistic trends in the frequency of CV sequences
The problem discussed is which CV sequences are generally favoured or disfavoured in the languages of the world, and the reasons for the trends. An investigation of relative frequencies of CV combinations in five languages is presented. The main result is that the favoured sequences are those in which there is no great movement of the articulatory organs from the consonant to the vowel. Examples are combinations of a dental consonant and a front …
More on English vowel shift: The back vowel question
One of the pivotal claims of the generative approach to English phonology is that a rule essentially duplicating the historical changes of the English Great Vowel Shift is a part of the phonological competence of contemporary speakers of the language (Chomsky & Halle 1968). Though experiments designed to test this claim have shown that some of the alternations predicted by such a rule (VSR) are at least marginally productive for speakers, a count…
Today the world, tomorrow phonology
Generative phonological research has typically relied heavily on gratuitous assumptions about the particular morphemic decompositions that are by convention treated as data, about the relevance of those decompositions to the determination of underlying forms, and about the individuation of linguistic phenomena. I discuss a number of topics that take on a different complexion when these gratuitous assumptions are avoided: the identification of par…
On the acquisition of abstract representations for English vowels
A basic assumption of generative and lexical phonology is that lexical entries of morphemes contain abstract phonological representations (APRs), and that surface pronunciations are derived from them by rules. Whether and how such a system can be acquired is problematic. This paper looks at the acquisition of APRs for English vowels and the Vowel Shift Rule (VSR), and tries to ascertain (1) whether VSR has any psychological reality, (2) at what a…
On the phoneme as the unit of the ‘second articulation’
This paper reviews the recent experimental evidence bearing on the issue of the psychological reality of the phoneme, particularly its general CLASS character, the relative NON-DISCRIMINABILITY of its positional variants (allophones), and its status as a discrete SEGMENT. Evidence bearing on a few selected problems of English phonemics is also discussed. All of the experiments cited, however, seem to have been to some extent contaminated by ortho…
Reduplication in Ewe: Morphological accommodation to phonological errors
Speech errors have often been used to support the psychological reality of phonologically dependent allomorphy in inflectional rules. The phenomenon of morphological accommodation to phonological errors is the most compelling evidence of this sort. We investigate reduplication in Ewe, experimentally inducing phonological errors to see whether reduplicated forms show accommodation. This was the case. Implications for reduplication in Ewe and for m…
The representation of phonological information during speech production planning: Evidence from vowel errors in spontaneous speech
A corpus of more than 500 speech errors that involve a vowel or syllabic nucleus is examined for evidence that bears on the nature of the processing representation that is in force when such errors occur. Evidence is obtained from the patterns of similarity between target segments and the intrusion segments that replace them in errors, on the assumption that target– intrusion similarity arises from characteristics of the processing representation…
Against the direct realist view of speech perception
An Ethological Perspective on Common Cross-Language Utilization of F0 of Voice
The author suggests that the following seemingly disparate phenomena have an underlying relationship: (a) cross-language similarities in the intonation contours for statements versus questions, (b) cross-cultural similarities in the vocal expression via intonation of attitude and affect, (c) cross-language patterns in the use of tone, vowels, and consonants in ‘sound symbolic’ vocabulary, (d) cross-species use of F0 in threatening or non threaten…
Towards an articulatory phonology
We propose an approach to phonological representation based on describing an utterance as an organised pattern of overlapping articulatory gestures. Because movement is inherent in our definition of gestures, these gestural ‘constellations’ can account for both spatial and temporal properties of speech in a relatively simple way. At the same time, taken as phonological representations, such gestural analyses offer many of the same advantages prov…
Phonetic Explanations for the Development of Tones
The development of contrastive tone because of the articulatory reinterpretation of segmentally-caused perturbations in intrinsic fundamental frequency is well attested in a number of unrelated languages. Considering the wide-spread character of this process, it is likely that its ‘seeds’ can be found in the functioning of the human articulatory and/or auditory mechanisms. This paper reviews what the authors consider promising explanations for we…
Prosodic phonology and phonetics
Our colleague Charles Fillmore invented the following parable (personal communication) to characterise the two dominant ways linguists attempt to solve problems of language structure and behaviour
Coarticulation and Phonology
Many sound patterns in languages are cases of fossilized coarticulation, that is, synchronic or phonetic contextual variation became diachronic or phonological variation via sound change. An examination of languages' phonologies can therefore yield insights into the mechanisms of coarticulation. In this paper I discuss (a) the need to differentiate between phonological processes that are and are not due to coarticulation, (b) the need to differen…
The representation of phonological information during speech production planning: Evidence from vowel errors in spontaneous speech
A corpus of more than 500 speech errors that involve a vowel or syllabic nucleus is examined for evidence that bears on the nature of the processing representation that is in force when such errors occur. Evidence is obtained from the patterns of similarity between target segments and the intrusion segments that replace them in errors, on the assumption that target– intrusion similarity arises from characteristics of the processing representation…
There is no interface between phonology and phonetics: A Personal View
Perceptual constraints and phonological change: A study of nasal vowel height
To address the claim that listener misperceptions are a source of phonological shifts in nasal vowel height, the phonological, acoustic and perceptual effects of nasalisation on vowel height were examined. We show that the acoustic consequences of nasal coupling, while consistent with phonological patterns of nasal vowel raising and lowering, do not always influence perceived vowel height. The perceptual data suggest that nasalisation affects per…
Consumer's guide to evidence in phonology
The purpose of evidence adduced in support of a theory is not to prove that theory true but to demonstrate that competing theories account for facts less well and thus no longer demand our attention. Evidence therefore, if it can unambiguously decide between competing theories, helps the discipline to spend its resources on only a few issues at a time. I evaluate this winnowing capacity of various kinds of evidence which have been offered in supp…
Cross-linguistic trends in the frequency of CV sequences
The problem discussed is which CV sequences are generally favoured or disfavoured in the languages of the world, and the reasons for the trends. An investigation of relative frequencies of CV combinations in five languages is presented. The main result is that the favoured sequences are those in which there is no great movement of the articulatory organs from the consonant to the vowel. Examples are combinations of a dental consonant and a front …
More on English vowel shift: The back vowel question
One of the pivotal claims of the generative approach to English phonology is that a rule essentially duplicating the historical changes of the English Great Vowel Shift is a part of the phonological competence of contemporary speakers of the language (Chomsky & Halle 1968). Though experiments designed to test this claim have shown that some of the alternations predicted by such a rule (VSR) are at least marginally productive for speakers, a count…
Against the direct realist view of speech perception
Experimental Phonology
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1987), pp. 207-222
On the acquisition of abstract representations for English vowels
A basic assumption of generative and lexical phonology is that lexical entries of morphemes contain abstract phonological representations (APRs), and that surface pronunciations are derived from them by rules. Whether and how such a system can be acquired is problematic. This paper looks at the acquisition of APRs for English vowels and the Vowel Shift Rule (VSR), and tries to ascertain (1) whether VSR has any psychological reality, (2) at what a…
Today the world, tomorrow phonology
Generative phonological research has typically relied heavily on gratuitous assumptions about the particular morphemic decompositions that are by convention treated as data, about the relevance of those decompositions to the determination of underlying forms, and about the individuation of linguistic phenomena. I discuss a number of topics that take on a different complexion when these gratuitous assumptions are avoided: the identification of par…
On the phoneme as the unit of the ‘second articulation’
This paper reviews the recent experimental evidence bearing on the issue of the psychological reality of the phoneme, particularly its general CLASS character, the relative NON-DISCRIMINABILITY of its positional variants (allophones), and its status as a discrete SEGMENT. Evidence bearing on a few selected problems of English phonemics is also discussed. All of the experiments cited, however, seem to have been to some extent contaminated by ortho…
Phonetically motivated parallels between child phonology and historical sound change
Phonological structure in speech recognition
Two bodies of recent research from experimental psycholinguistics are summarised, each of which is centred upon a concept from phonology: LEXICAL STRESS and the SYLLABLE. The evidence indicates that neither construct plays a role in prelexical representations during speech recognition. Both constructs, however, are well supported by other performance evidence. Testing phonological claims against performance evidence from psycholinguistics can be …
Reduplication in Ewe: Morphological accommodation to phonological errors
Speech errors have often been used to support the psychological reality of phonologically dependent allomorphy in inflectional rules. The phenomenon of morphological accommodation to phonological errors is the most compelling evidence of this sort. We investigate reduplication in Ewe, experimentally inducing phonological errors to see whether reduplicated forms show accommodation. This was the case. Implications for reduplication in Ewe and for m…
Suprasegmentals
The Story of [w]: An Exercise in the Phonetic Explanation for Sound Patterns
Proceedings of the 3rd Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1977), pp. 577-599
Southern Bantu vs. the World: The Case of Palatalization of Labials
Proceedings of the 4th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1978), pp. 370-386
Phonetic Explanations for the Development of Tones
The development of contrastive tone because of the articulatory reinterpretation of segmentally-caused perturbations in intrinsic fundamental frequency is well attested in a number of unrelated languages. Considering the wide-spread character of this process, it is likely that its ‘seeds’ can be found in the functioning of the human articulatory and/or auditory mechanisms. This paper reviews what the authors consider promising explanations for we…
Phonetically motivated parallels between child phonology and historical sound change
Cross-Language Use of Pitch: An Ethological View
Certain signaling functions of the pitch of voice are remarkably similar across languages and cultures: (1) high or rising pitch to mark questions, low or falling pitch to mark nonquestions; (2) high pitch to signal politeness, low pitch to signal assertiveness; (3) in ‘sound symbolic’ vocabulary, high tone used with words connoting smallness or diminutive, low tone with words connoting largeness. These patterns can be explained by the assumption…
The Origin of Sound Patterns in Vocal Tract Constraints
An Ethological Perspective on Common Cross-Language Utilization of F0 of Voice
The author suggests that the following seemingly disparate phenomena have an underlying relationship: (a) cross-language similarities in the intonation contours for statements versus questions, (b) cross-cultural similarities in the vocal expression via intonation of attitude and affect, (c) cross-language patterns in the use of tone, vowels, and consonants in ‘sound symbolic’ vocabulary, (d) cross-species use of F0 in threatening or non threaten…
On the Structure of Phonetic Categories
Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1984)
Prosodic phonology and phonetics
Our colleague Charles Fillmore invented the following parable (personal communication) to characterise the two dominant ways linguists attempt to solve problems of language structure and behaviour
Experimental phonology
Phonological structure in speech recognition
Two bodies of recent research from experimental psycholinguistics are summarised, each of which is centred upon a concept from phonology: LEXICAL STRESS and the SYLLABLE. The evidence indicates that neither construct plays a role in prelexical representations during speech recognition. Both constructs, however, are well supported by other performance evidence. Testing phonological claims against performance evidence from psycholinguistics can be …
Towards an articulatory phonology
We propose an approach to phonological representation based on describing an utterance as an organised pattern of overlapping articulatory gestures. Because movement is inherent in our definition of gestures, these gestural ‘constellations’ can account for both spatial and temporal properties of speech in a relatively simple way. At the same time, taken as phonological representations, such gestural analyses offer many of the same advantages prov…
Consumer's guide to evidence in phonology
The purpose of evidence adduced in support of a theory is not to prove that theory true but to demonstrate that competing theories account for facts less well and thus no longer demand our attention. Evidence therefore, if it can unambiguously decide between competing theories, helps the discipline to spend its resources on only a few issues at a time. I evaluate this winnowing capacity of various kinds of evidence which have been offered in supp…
Perceptual constraints and phonological change: A study of nasal vowel height
To address the claim that listener misperceptions are a source of phonological shifts in nasal vowel height, the phonological, acoustic and perceptual effects of nasalisation on vowel height were examined. We show that the acoustic consequences of nasal coupling, while consistent with phonological patterns of nasal vowel raising and lowering, do not always influence perceived vowel height. The perceptual data suggest that nasalisation affects per…
Cross-linguistic trends in the frequency of CV sequences
The problem discussed is which CV sequences are generally favoured or disfavoured in the languages of the world, and the reasons for the trends. An investigation of relative frequencies of CV combinations in five languages is presented. The main result is that the favoured sequences are those in which there is no great movement of the articulatory organs from the consonant to the vowel. Examples are combinations of a dental consonant and a front …
More on English vowel shift: The back vowel question
One of the pivotal claims of the generative approach to English phonology is that a rule essentially duplicating the historical changes of the English Great Vowel Shift is a part of the phonological competence of contemporary speakers of the language (Chomsky & Halle 1968). Though experiments designed to test this claim have shown that some of the alternations predicted by such a rule (VSR) are at least marginally productive for speakers, a count…
Today the world, tomorrow phonology
Generative phonological research has typically relied heavily on gratuitous assumptions about the particular morphemic decompositions that are by convention treated as data, about the relevance of those decompositions to the determination of underlying forms, and about the individuation of linguistic phenomena. I discuss a number of topics that take on a different complexion when these gratuitous assumptions are avoided: the identification of par…
On the acquisition of abstract representations for English vowels
A basic assumption of generative and lexical phonology is that lexical entries of morphemes contain abstract phonological representations (APRs), and that surface pronunciations are derived from them by rules. Whether and how such a system can be acquired is problematic. This paper looks at the acquisition of APRs for English vowels and the Vowel Shift Rule (VSR), and tries to ascertain (1) whether VSR has any psychological reality, (2) at what a…
On the phoneme as the unit of the ‘second articulation’
This paper reviews the recent experimental evidence bearing on the issue of the psychological reality of the phoneme, particularly its general CLASS character, the relative NON-DISCRIMINABILITY of its positional variants (allophones), and its status as a discrete SEGMENT. Evidence bearing on a few selected problems of English phonemics is also discussed. All of the experiments cited, however, seem to have been to some extent contaminated by ortho…
Reduplication in Ewe: Morphological accommodation to phonological errors
Speech errors have often been used to support the psychological reality of phonologically dependent allomorphy in inflectional rules. The phenomenon of morphological accommodation to phonological errors is the most compelling evidence of this sort. We investigate reduplication in Ewe, experimentally inducing phonological errors to see whether reduplicated forms show accommodation. This was the case. Implications for reduplication in Ewe and for m…
The representation of phonological information during speech production planning: Evidence from vowel errors in spontaneous speech
A corpus of more than 500 speech errors that involve a vowel or syllabic nucleus is examined for evidence that bears on the nature of the processing representation that is in force when such errors occur. Evidence is obtained from the patterns of similarity between target segments and the intrusion segments that replace them in errors, on the assumption that target– intrusion similarity arises from characteristics of the processing representation…
Against the direct realist view of speech perception
Experimental Phonology
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1987), pp. 207-222
The Phonetic Basis of Perceptual Ratings of Running Speech
Linguistics (29 works) · Phonetics and Phonology Research (28 works) · Psychology (20 works) · Philosophy (18 works) · Computer Science (16 works) · Linguistic Variation and Morphology (15 works) · Phonology (14 works) · Speech recognition (10 works) · Acoustics (8 works) · Phonetics (7 works)