Applying Perceptual Methods to the Study of Phonetic Variation and Sound Change

Abstract Linguists have long recognized phonetic variation as a key factor in sound change (e.g. Paul 1880; Baudouin de Courtenay 1972a), and researchers’ ability to study phonetic variation continues to evolve with methodological advances. For example, the use of conversational corpora to study variation in connected speech has opened the door to large-scale investigation of the ways in which variation in speech production mirrors patterns of sound change. At the same time, a comparable large-scale database is not available, nor possible, for speech perception.