This article describes a tool that can be used by blind and visually impaired students in phonetics and phonology classrooms: a tactile International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) magnet-board system. This tool consists of IPA magnets and phonological rule symbols that are printed and embossed, so as to be readable by both sighted and visually impaired individuals. A user of the tool can lay out phonetic and phonological data on the magnet board for communicative, organizational, or problem-solving purposes. Since the magnet board can be read both visually and tactually, it can serve as a collaborative space that can be used by both sighted and visually impaired members of the classroom. Potential uses include group work in class and as an augmentation to chalkboard problem-solving demonstrations. The tool can complement already extant options for blind and visually impaired students and facilitate collaboration between sighted and visually impaired students. Here, we describe the tool, exemplify some potential uses, and offer suggestions for further improvement.

Dissatisfied with traditional grading, we developed a grading system to directly assess whether students have mastered course material. We identified the set of skills students need to master in a course and provided multiple opportunities for students to demonstrate mastery of each skill. We describe in detail how we implemented the system for two undergraduate courses, Introductory Phonetics and Phonology I. Our goals were to decrease student stress, increase student learning and make students' study efforts more effective, increase students' metacognitive awareness, promote a growth mindset, encourage students to aim for mastery rather than partial credit, be fairer to students facing structural and institutional disadvantages, reduce our time spent on grading, and facilitate complying with new accreditation requirements. Our own reflections and student feedback indicate that many of these goals were met.

Many properties of languages, including sign languages, are not uniformly distributed among items in the lexicon. Some of this nonuniformity can be accounted for by appeal to articulatory ease, with easier articulations being overrepresented in the lexicon in comparison to more difficult articulations. The literature on ease of articulation deals only with the active effort internal to the articulation itself. We note the existence of a previously unstudied aspect of articulatory ease, which we call REACTIVE EFFORT: the effort of resisting incidental movement that has been induced by an articulation elsewhere in the body. For example, reactive effort is needed to resist incidental twisting and rocking of the torso induced by path movement of the manual articulators in sign languages. We argue that, as part of a general linguistic drive to reduce articulatory effort, reactive effort should have a significant effect on the relative frequency in the lexicon of certain types of path movements. We support this argument with evidence from Italian Sign Language, Sri Lankan Sign Language, and Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language, evidence that cannot be explained solely by appeal to constraints on bimanual coordination. As the first exploration of the linguistic role of reactive effort, this work contributes not only to the developing field of sign language phonetics, but also to our understanding of phonetics in general, adding to a growing body of functionalist literature showing that some linguistic patterns emerge from more fundamental factors of the physical world.

Spoken language has a well-known drive for ease of articulation, which Kirchner (1998, 2004) analyzes as reduction of the total magnitude of all biomechanical forces involved. We extend Kirchner's insights from vocal articulation to manual articulation, with a focus on joint usage, and we discuss ways that articulatory ease might be realized in sign languages. In particular, moving more joints and/or joints more proximal to the torso results in greater mass being moved, and thus more articulatory force being expended, than moving fewer joints or moving more distal joints. We predict that in casual conversation, where articulatory ease is prized, moving fewer joints should be favored over moving more, and moving distal joints should be favored over moving proximal joints. We report on the results of our study of the casual signing of fluent signers of American Sign Language, which confirm our predictions: in comparison to citation forms of signs, the casual variants produced by the signers in our experiment exhibit an overall decrease in average joint usage, as well as a general preference for more distal articulation than is used in citation form. We conclude that all language, regardless of modality, is shaped by a fundamental drive for ease of articulation. Our work advances a cross-modality approach for considering ease of articulation, develops a potentially important vocabulary for describing variations in signs, and demonstrates that American Sign Language exhibits variation that can be accounted for in terms of ease of articulation. We further suggest that the linguistic drive for ease of articulation is part of a broader tendency for the human body to reduce biomechanical effort in all physical activities.

This work explores the effect of ease of articulation on speech by examining the rates at which various consonants occur in word lists representing thousands of languages. The data reveal that obstruents produced with oral obstruction closer to the glottis are less likely to be voiced when contrasted with their counterparts produced in the anterior region of the vocal tract. While this finding is explainable via previously documented aerodynamic factors, these new data suggest that such factors may have a more powerful influence on speech than typically assumed. The pattern in question is evident even after controlling for the relatedness and areal proximity of language varieties. This study isolates and quantifies the decrease in consonant voicing associated with the reduction in size of the supralaryngeal cavity.

An automated sound correspondence-recognition program developed by the authors is applied to a data set consisting of standardized word lists for over half of the world's languages. Online appendices present the results in a compendium of 692 recurrent sound correspondences that contains information about the frequency of occurrence of each correspondence. Applications of the compendium to historical linguistics are proposed. For example, the catalog of correspondences and frequencies facilitates objective assessment of the commonness or rarity of shared phonological innovations cited as evidence for language-family subgrouping. In another analysis, correspondence frequency is used to measure the degree of similarity between different sounds, yielding models for classifying consonants and vowels that substantially agree with articulatory properties. Correspondence-based similarities are also compared with measurements of sound similarity involving factors such as perceptual confusions, speech errors, and cooccurrence patterns in synchronic phonological rules. Sound similarity discerned from both the perception and production of speech is found to correlate to about the same extent with correspondence-based similarities.

San Sebastián del Monte Mixtec (henceforth SSM), also known as Tò’on Ndà’vi, is a language of the Mixtecan family, Otomanguean stock. SSM has lexical tones that are orthogonal to rearticulation on vowels. The aim of this production study is to examine both long modal and rearticulated vowels to gain insight into the SSM tonal system, contrastive voice quality, and any potential interactions between voice quality and f0. Rearticulated vowels are described as having a glottal gesture between two vowels of the same quality (V͡ˀV), while modal vowels have no such gesture (VV). To this end, we examined the phonetic realization of the lexical tones in long modal vowels in terms of f0. All tones are distinguished by f0; f0 patterns largely as expected given previously ascribed labels, with minor deviations. Secondly, the phasing and degree of glottalization in rearticulated vowels was measured using ‘strength of excitation’ (SoE); generally the glottal gesture was vowel medial with a dip in SoE at the beginning of the glottal gesture and a rise in SoE following the glottal gesture. However, there was a large degree of interspeaker variation in the production of rearticulated vowels. Additionally, lexical tone category was found to have an impact on the phasing and degree of glottal gesture in rearticulated vowels, and on voice quality in long modal vowels. This supports the idea that voice quality is an additional correlate of lexical tone in SSM.

Auditory verbal hallucinations are a common phenomenon in the general population, with many people without psychological issues reporting the experience. In the ‘White Christmas’ method to induce auditory hallucinations, participants are told that they will be played a portion of the song ‘White Christmas’ and are asked to report when they hear it. Participants are presented only with stochastic noise; still, a large proportion of participants report hearing the song. The experiments reported here investigate how masking relationships modulate verbal hallucinations in the White-Christmas effect. Specifically, we tested how the effect is modulated by different kinds of maskers (multi-talker babble versus spectrally matched speech-shaped stochastic noise) and different kinds of expectation of the speech being masked (expecting a ‘normal’ modal voice versus a whispered voice behind the masking). The White Christmas effect was replicated, and the rate of verbal hallucinations was higher for multi-talker babble than for spectrally-matched speech-shaped stochastic noise. In addition, a trend for a higher rate of hallucination for whispered voices was found. These results confirm the role of masking relations in the White Christmas effect and reinforce the similarity between the White Christmas effect and continuity illusions such as phoneme restoration.

The H* ~ L + H* pitch accent contrast in English has been a matter of lengthy debate, with some arguing that L + H* is an emphatic version of H* and others that the accents are phonetically and pragmatically distinct. Empirical evidence is inconclusive, possibly because studies do not consider dialectal variation and individual variability. We focused on Standard Southern British English (SSBE), which has not been extensively investigated with respect to this contrast, and used Rapid Prosody Transcription (RPT) to examine differences in prominence based on accent form and function. L + H*s were rated more prominent than H*s but only when the former were used for contrast and the latter were not, indicating that participants had expectations about the form–function connection. However, they also differed substantially in which they considered primary (form or function). We replicated both the general findings and the patterns of individual variability with a second RPT study which also showed that the relative prioritization of form or function related to participant differences in empathy, musicality and autistic-like traits. In conclusion, the two accents are used to encode different pragmatics, though the form–function mapping is not clear-cut, suggesting a marginal contrast that not every SSBE speaker shares and attends to.