Vowel reduction as information loss
JOHN HARRIS
Vowel reduction degrades phonetic information in the speech signal and
should be understood as having an analogous impact on phonological
representations.
Reduction follows two apparently contradictory routes in vowel space,
yielding either centralised values (the ‘centripetal’ pattern) or the
corner values a, i, u (the
‘centrifugal’ pattern). What unifies these vowels is the relative
simplicity of their acoustic spectra compared to those of mid
peripheral vowels. Spectral complexity can be taken as one measure of
the amount of phonetic information present in a speech signal at a
given time. On this basis, centripetal and centrifugal reduction can
both be construed as resulting in a loss of phonetic information.
In selectively targeting non-prominent positions, reduction has the
effect of enhancing syntagmatic contrasts among vowels. Representing
vowels in terms of three basic components manifested as a, i and u allows informational asymmetries
of this sort are to be directly recorded in phonological grammars.
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