High-vowel laxing in Laurentian French is notoriously variable and complex: while high-vowel tenseness is categorically predictable in final syllables, speakers seemingly apply distinct combinations of optional processes in non-final syllables (see, e.g., Dumas 1987 and Poliquin 2006). The current study investigates laxing in non-final syllables with two core objectives: (a) to determine which grammars individual speakers have acquired, and (b) to elucidate whether subgroups within the community have distinct grammars as suggested by Poliquin or instead these subgroups are superficial categorisations (e.g., emerging from a shared community with wide distributions of possible weightings for constraints). The results reveal that a larger number of superficially distinct individual grammars emerge than were proposed in existing literature, but that these patterns fall on a spectrum centred on a shared community grammar. They also provide new evidence for the importance of prosody in conditioning phonological processes in this variety of French.

This article examines a case of phonological opacity in Uyghur resulting from an interaction between backness harmony and a vowel reduction process that converts harmonic vowels into transparent vowels. A large-scale corpus study shows that although opaque harmony with the underlying form of a reduced vowel is the dominant pattern, cases of surface-apparent harmony also occur. The rate of surface-apparent harmony varies across roots and is correlated with a number of factors, including root frequency. These data pose problems for standard accounts of opacity, which do not predict such variation. I propose an analysis where variation emerges from conflict between a paradigm uniformity constraint mandating that the harmonising behaviour of a root remains consistent, and surface phonotactic constraints. This is implemented in a parallel model by scaling constraint violations according to certainty in a root’s harmonic class. This aligns with past work suggesting some opacity is driven by paradigm uniformity.

In Paraguayan Guaraní (PG), nasalisation processes affect material to both the left and right of a stressed nasal vowel. While some prior literature has claimed that bidirectional harmony is active in the language, others have noted that progressive nasalisation appears to be morpheme-specific and likely dependent on a different mechanism from regressive nasal harmony. Recent work shows that Spanish-origin lexical items participate in regressive nasal harmony, but the interactions of etymological origin and progressive nasalisation remain unclear. Drawing on a corpus of 26 sociolinguistic interviews as well as elicitation with native speakers of PG, I argue that the mechanisms underlying the two types of nasalisation in the language are in fact different. I propose that PG regressive nasalisation is best analysed as productive nasal harmony, while progressive nasalisation represents a case of morpheme-specific allomorphy. Additionally, though the PG pattern of regressive nasal harmony has been extended to items of Spanish origin, this is not the case for progressive nasalisation. This corpus study provides insight into the specific factors that condition variation in nasalisation processes, contributing to a growing literature investigating variable application of harmony.

This article presents a dictionary-based study of vowel reduction and preservation in British English in initial pretonic position and intertonic position. The different variables which have been claimed to influence those processes are tested on a data set of over 4,500 words using regression analyses. Our results confirm the significant effects of syllable structure, position of the vowel, word frequency and opaque prefixation. They also provide weak evidence for other factors such as vowel features and the existence of a base in which the vowel bears a stress, although no clear effects of word segmentability could be found. We also report new findings, as we find that foreign words reduce less than non-foreign words; we find that [+back] vowels reduce less than [−back] vowels in initial pretonic position; and we find a difference in behaviour for vowels followed by /sC/ clusters between non-derived words and stress-shifted derivatives.

In natural speech, phonetic cues that distinguish lexical items can be hyperarticulated when there is a minimal pair competitor, a process known as contrastive hyperarticulation. Building upon prior work, this article examines the cue-specific nature of contrastive hyperarticulation in Japanese, focussing on stop voice onset time (VOT) using a speech corpus. We confirmed that the existence of a voicing minimal pair competitor in the lexicon triggers hyperarticulation of VOT duration on the target segment (shorter for voiced stops and longer for voiceless stops), while other contrasts (singleton vs. geminate) did not. The results also suggest that contrastive hyperarticulation (a) is more compatible with casual speech than slow/clear speech, (b) is sensitive to position in a word (greater in word-initial position than in non-initial position) and (c) applies to a greater degree in Japanese than in English due to properties of stops. This provides further evidence that the phonetic specificity of contrastive hyperarticulation is cross-linguistically relevant.