ABSTRACT
The chapter is concerned with how the mechanisms of human speech processing can occasionally give rise to historical sound change. The starting point is the origin of sound change and the extent to which it derives from occasional inherent ambiguities in the transmission of speech dynamics between a speaker and hearer. The further question is how processing in production and perception can lead to phonologization in which the cues for a phonological contrast are transferred to non-contrastive phonetic variation. The focus is then on whether the instabilities between production and perception dynamics that can lead to sound change exist at the level of the individual or at a group level. A particular concern is to establish whether perception leads production during a sound change in progress. An overview is then presented of the relevance of variations in hyper- and hypoarticulated speech for understanding sound change. A general conclusion is that phonologization may emerge out of hypoarticulated speech produced in response to semantically predictable parts of utterances. The final section’s theme is on agent-based models of sound change and on how the origin and spread of sound change can be brought together within a cognitive-computational architecture derived from a combination of theories of system dynamics and exemplar models of speech.
