Linking Variation in Perception and Production in Sound Change: Evidence from Dutch Obstruent Devoicing.
Anne-France Pinget, René Kager, Hans Van de Velde
PMID 31623510WHAT IT FOUND
In Dutch speakers undergoing a sound change, perception shifts before production begins, but lags behind as the change finishes.
Listeners retain the ability to distinguish sounds they no longer produce themselves. This suggests therapeutic approaches to accent modification should target perception first.
Key findings
01At the beginning of a sound change, participants' perception had already shifted more than their production, indicating perception leads production in early stages.
02Towards the end of the sound change, perception lagged behind production, meaning individuals continued to distinguish categories perceptually even after merging them in their own speech.
03There is a moderate link between individual production and perception, where the degree of categorical perception decreases as the voiced category in production becomes more devoiced.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study is cross-sectional, using different individuals to represent different stages of change rather than tracking the same people over time, so it infers a temporal process from static data. The conclusion that perception lags behind production at the end of change relies on a derived measure (diffPP) and the assumption that the steepest slope observed in the sample represents maximum categorical perception. The study focuses on standard Dutch in a specific sociolinguistic context; generalizing to other languages or dialects requires caution. The devoicing of stops (/b/) showed no clear regional pattern, making it difficult to determine if it is a true sound change in progress or stable idiosyncratic variation.
Declared interests
The research was funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO grant 322-75-002). No commercial conflicts of interest were declared.
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume that a patient's inability to produce a sound contrast means they cannot perceive it. The study shows that perception can remain distinct even when production has merged the categories, particularly in the later stages of a sound change.