A perception-induced /t/-to-/k/ sound change: evidence from a cross-linguistic study

(Ohala. 1989. Sound change is drawn froma pool of synchronic variation. In Leiv Egil Breivik & Ernst Hakon Jahr (eds.), Language change: Contributions to the study of its causes [Series: Trends in Linguistics, Studies and Monographs No. 43], 173-198. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter); (Ohala. 1993a. Sound change as nature's speech perception experiment. Speech Communication 13. 155-161) and (Ohala. 1993b. The phonetics of sound change. In Charles Jones (ed.), Historical linguistics: Problems and perspectives, 237-278. London: Longman) claimed that the source of sound change may lie inmisperceptions which can be replicated in the laboratory. We tested this claim for a historical change of /t/ to /k/ in the coda in the Southern Min dialect of Chaoshan. We conducted a forced-choice segment identification task with CVC syllables in which the final C varied across the segments [p t k ?] in addition to a number of further variables, including the V, which ranged across [i u a]. The results from three groups of participants whose native languages have the coda systems /p t k ?/ (Zhangquan), /p k ?/ (Chaoshan) and/pt k/ (Dutch) indicate that [t] is the least stably perceived segment overall. It is particularly disfavoured when it follows [a], where there is a bias towards [k]. We argue that this finding supports a perceptual account of the historically documented scenario whereby a change from /at/ to /ak/ preceded and triggered a more general merger of /t/ with /k/ in the coda of Chaoshan. While we grant that perceptual sound changes are not the only or even themost common type of sound change, the fact that the perception results are essentially the same across the three language groups lends credibility to Ohala's perceptually motivated sound changes.