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/u/-Fronting and Agent-Based Modeling: The Relationship Between The Origin and Spread of Sound Change

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2026

Jonathan Harrington*
Affiliation:
Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich
Florian Schiel*
Affiliation:
Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich

Abstract

This study is concerned with whether an asymmetric phonetic overlap between speaker groups contributes to the directional spread of sound change. An acoustic analysis of speakers of Southern British English showed that younger speakers’ fronted /u/ was probabilistically closer to that of older speakers’ retracted /u/ distributions than the other way around. Agent-based modeling based on the same data showed an asymmetric shift of older toward younger speakers’ fronted /u/. The general conclusion is that sound change is likely to be propagated when a phonetic bias within an individual is further magnified by a difference between speaker groups that is in the same direction.

Information

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 2017 Linguistic Society of America

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