The present paper provides an overview of articulatory complexity and articulatory difficulty in speech production, with a focus on their relevance to acquisition, sound change, and disordered speech. These constructs are important because structures described as articulatorily complex often show distinct production patterns: they may be acquired later, produced less accurately by speakers with speech disorders, or be more susceptible to diachronic change. However, understanding when articulatory complexity has an explanatory role in speech production requires not only assessing degrees of complexity but also determining when complex movements result in articulatory consequences. Researchers have operationalized articulatory complexity in several ways, but existing metrics do not always yield the same predictions. This paper reviews major approaches to establishing articulatory complexity and evaluates commonly used complexity scales. Particular attention is given to the limitations of these scales, especially when they are interpreted as measures of articulatory difficulty. The review concludes by examining experimental methods for assessing articulatory difficulty more directly. I argue that such methods provide a more reliable basis for establishing the relationship between complexity, difficulty, and observed production patterns.

A well-known feature of many Italo-Romance varieties of the Veneto region is the weakening of intervocalic /l/, a phenomenon known as the ‘evanescent’ /l/. Here /l/ surfaces as [l] pre- and post-consonantally, as the glide [e̯] intervocalically between back vowels, and as $\emptyset$ intervocalically next to at least one front vowel. While extensively documented descriptively and dialectologically, its phonetic properties remain underexplored. This study examines the phenomenon in Estense Veneto, a Central Veneto variety, offering fine-grained acoustic data that clarify both its phonetic and phonological profile. The results confirm that between back vowels, the glide [e̯] is realized with a marked F2 rise, supporting its characterization as a front segment. Crucially, however, [e̯] is found to be phonetically distinct from [j], being lower and less fronted. Consistent with Proctor’s (2011) characterization of dorsal gestures for ‘light’ laterals, the findings suggest that the glide is phonologically a front-mid segment and reflects the persistence of the original lateral’s tongue-body gesture, once the tongue-tip gesture is lost. In turn, glide deletion is shown to be phonetically conditioned by the surrounding vowels, with a threshold of articulatory salience below which the glide is elided. The evidence suggests that this gradient alternation of [e̯] with $\emptyset$ may be entering a stage of conventionalization, but remains phonetic rather than phonological, challenging traditional allophonic accounts of [e̯] and $\emptyset$ as two distinct allophones of /l/. Overall, the paper refines our understanding of lateral lenition in Veneto and its place in broader discussions of sound change.

This study examines the phenomenon of word-final /n/ deletion (WFnD) in Central Franconian dialects spoken across parts of the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany and France. The deletion process occurs after schwa and full vowels and manifests itself in different phonological patterns across dialects. The paper presents a comparative analysis based on a selection of local varieties, investigating the effects of the left-hand and right-hand phonological context on WFnD. The theoretical framework of the ‘Life Cycle of Phonological Processes’ serves to reconstruct the diachronic development of WFnD, allowing to trace its progression from systematic phonetic variation to a categorical phonological phenomenon and lexicalized forms. By applying this framework, the study demonstrates how different dialects exhibit WFnD at distinct stages of the life cycle, revealing the systematic nature of its historical unfolding. The findings highlight the role and interplay of prosodic, phonological, morphological and lexical factors conditioning WFnD.

The effect of sound change and analogy upon inflectional paradigms has been traditionally described through Sturtevant’s Paradox, which states that sound change is regular but generates irregularity, whereas analogy is irregular but generates regularity. While past work has explored trends in sound change and analogy qualitatively, quantitative investigation with large data sets remains underexploited. We tackle this by exploring the effects of sound change and analogy from Latin to French in large etymologically paired inflected lexicons containing the complete paradigms of 310 verbs with 11,593 total forms. We employ a novel method combining the automated application of historical sound changes and entropy-based quantitative analysis to examine separately the effects of sound change and analogy. The results confirm the role of some oft-cited predictors of analogy like token frequency and morphological regularity, but offer no support for others like markedness. Results also confirm the complexifying role of sound change, and the simplifying role of analogy, on aspects of morphological complexity like the number of inflection classes and the amount of allomorphy, but suggest that these forces have no comparable effect on more modern measures of complexity like average conditional entropies between inflected forms.

The current study examines variation in postvocalic /r/ in Tarifit, an indigenous Amazigh language of northern Morocco. R-elision is the most frequent phonological form (over 80% of productions in our data). Non-rhoticity is socially conditioned by gender: women produce more r-elision than men. No age differences were observed. Thus, production data indicate that derhoticization is a highly advanced sound change in Tarifit. Additionally, speakers are more likely to produce postvocalic /r/ immediately following a talker who has just produced it (even in a different lexical item). Social evaluations of speakers who produce r-ful and r-less forms of words are also investigated; listeners are more likely to rate a speaker as sounding more educated and nicer when they produce r-elision. Results demonstrate that r-elision is socially conditioned in Tarifit and these findings are discussed in terms of their implications for models of sound change in small and endangered speech communities, and theories about the relationship between the production and perception of phonological variation.

In this study, we explored the social predictors of an ongoing sound change in the Twi Advanced Tongue Root harmony system by acoustically examining production variation in a sample of 105 speakers representing urban and traditional localities in Ghana. In the urban locality, the change was evident in all age-groups and near completion in the youngest generation. In the traditional locality, by contrast, the change was evident only in some younger speakers. The effect of gender differed between localities: urban men were more advanced in the change than urban women, whereas traditional speakers showing the change were predominantly women. By reflecting the gender dynamics of societal engagement and contact in Ghana, these findings highlight the importance of local social context for the manifestation of variation and the unique insights of non-Western communities for sociolinguistic theory.

We contend that attention to signed languages is crucial for a fuller understanding of the processes and mechanisms behind regular sound change in spoken languages. While the label ‘regular sound change’ would seem to limit the object of study to language change in the auditory-vocal channel, a typical assumption is that a visual-gestural modality correlate to regular sound change exists. At the same time, there exists a conflicting position that languages in nonauditory modalities, as they do not deal with sounds, are irrelevant to the study of sound change. These contradictory stances converge in their consequences, leading to the general practice in historical linguistics of not taking evidence from signed languages into account when developing theories of sound change. However, we argue that consideration of the affordances of the visual-gestural modality, and the distinctive aspects of language transmission and demographics in signing communities, is of particular value for refining the field’s understanding of the processes and constraints on regular sound change. Insights from signed languages push us to reframe the processes and mechanisms that lead to regular sound change and to broaden our understanding of why it happens. This has implications for a programmatic exploration of theories of regular sound change.

Knowledge of the mechanisms of phonetically motivated sound changes is incomplete and based primarily on apparent—rather than real-time—evidence. How exactly does an innovative variant become the new norm within individual and population-level grammars? Here, eighteen L1 English speakers were recorded in 2014 and again in 2022. Acoustic analysis of sibilants in /str/ shows (i) coarticulatory /s/-retraction for all speakers in 2014 and (ii) a group-level increase in the degree of /s/-retraction in 2022. Perception data show that increased /s/-retraction was audible to listeners. Increased /s/-retraction also matched the outcome of simulated interaction between the speaker participants in an agent-based model. However, the effects of sound change are not predictable within idiolects: some speakers’ production targets shifted incrementally in the opposite direction of the group-level trend.

In this response to the target article by Law, Power, and Quinto-Pozos, I draw attention to the fact that ‘sound change’ in sign languages does not seem to follow the Neogrammarian regularity principle and that, as a consequence, synchronic phonologies of sign languages do not have productive, obligatory phonological rules (whether allophonic or allomorphic rules). For example, the sound change that introduced aspiration for voiceless stops at the beginning of stressed syllables (when not preceded by /s/) is reflected as a regular, so-called allophonic rule in the synchronic phonological grammar of Modern English. Sign languages do not appear to have such regular allophonic rules or regular allomorphic rules.

A central task in sound change research is to account for the emergence of new phonological categories from patterns of synchronic phonetic variation. To this end, a comparison was made of two English dialects differing in their phonologization of coarticulatory vowel nasalization using real-time magnetic resonance imaging of the velum and tongue and their synchronization with the glottal signal. This was done for coda vowel-nasal (VN) sequences preceding voiced and voiceless stops. The results showed that a later phasing of N’s oral gesture and an earlier onset of aperiodicity in the nasal consonant were two of the main physiological factors likely to lead to sound change in voiceless VNC̥ clusters. They were also consistent with models of compensatory lengthening by which the vowel is lengthened and the oral gesture of the nasal consonant is shortened as sound change progresses.

This paper provides a response to Law, Power, and Quinto-Pozos’s target article, focusing on two issues. First, I point out that the initial framing of their proposal undercuts the larger point that sign languages should be included in linguistic analysis in order to better understand all human languages, rather than specifically in order to better understand spoken languages. Second, I discuss a number of practical considerations for undertaking the analysis of sound change they advocate for, with a focus on transcription. I describe several tools that have been developed for addressing this issue and discuss how they can be employed in the study of sound change in sign languages.

This paper responds to commentaries by several authors on our target article, ‘Bringing signed languages into the study of regular sound change’ (Law et al. 2025a). We provide some additional context on the research program that spurred the target article and draw on several themes discussed in both the target article and commentaries, specifically (i) the affordances and effects of modality in (theories of) language change, (ii) iconicity (and indexicality), (iii) variation and irregularity in language change, and (iv) language transmission. We highlight the methodological advances afforded by new technologies to study phonetic variation in signed languages and advocate for increased attention to the systematic and comparative study of phonetic variation in signed languages as a window into processes of phonetic and phonological change in signed languages.

In their target article, Law, Power, and Quinto-Pozos discuss the scarcity of regular sound change in signed languages, and they provide a long list of fascinating linguistic and social reasons why this could be the case. Exploring the effects of modality on sound change has the potential to advance our understanding of signed and spoken languages and language in general. In this response, I focus on the implications of the idea that the relative abundance of regular sound change and phonological rules in spoken languages is a consequence of a specific peculiarity of the auditory-vocal modality, namely, that it is highly serial and temporally compressed.

Although coarticulatory variation is largely systematic, and serves as useful information for listeners, such variation is nonetheless linked to sound change. This article explores the articulatory and perceptual interactions between a coarticulatory source and its effects, and how these interactions likely contribute to change. The focus is on the historical change VN (phonetically, ṼN) > Ṽ, but with more general attention to how a gesture associated with a source segment comes to be reinterpreted as distinctively, rather than coarticulatorily, associated with a nearby vowel or consonant. Two synchronic factors are hypothesized to contribute to reinterpretation: (i) articulatory covariation between the duration of the coarticulatory source (here, N) and the temporal extent of its effects (Ṽ), and (ii) perceived equivalence between source and effect. Experimental support for both hypotheses is provided. Additionally, the experimental data are linked to the historical situation by showing that the contextual conditions that trigger (i) and (ii) parallel the conditions that historically influence phonologization of vowel nasalization.

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.