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Foreign Accent and Forensic Speaker Identification in Voice Lineups: The Influence of Acoustic Features Based on Prosody

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Published on: September 27, 2024

Towards a continuous population model for natural language vowel shift.

Patrick D Shipman¹, Sérgio H Faria, Christopher Strickland

¹Department of Mathematics, Colorado State University, 1874 Campus Delivery, Fort Collins, CO 80523-1874, USA. shipman@math.colostate.edu

Journal of Theoretical Biology

|April 30, 2013

Summary

This study models regular phonetic changes in language, like vowel shifts, using a population approach. It explains how learning and social factors influence gradual changes in pronunciation over time.

Keywords:

Continuous diversity McKendrick–von Foerster equation Natural language learning Phonetic distribution Structured population dynamics

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Area of Science:

Linguistics
Mathematical Biology
Sociolinguistics

Background:

Collective language change involves regular phonetic shifts, exemplified by historical vowel shifts.
Modeling these changes requires accounting for learning patterns and social influences on pronunciation.

Observation:

Vowel pronunciation is modeled as a continuous variable in vowel space, dependent on time and speaker age.
A structured population approach extends the McKendrick-von Foerster equation to populations with phonetic and age structures.

Findings:

General balance equations for populations with age and phonetic structures were developed.
Numerical simulations illustrate phonetic equilibrium and vowel shift dynamics driven by initial pronunciation distributions and immigrant influences.

Implications:

The model provides a framework for understanding the evolution of vowel systems and other cognitive processes in self-interacting populations.
This approach can be applied to model changes in opinions, perceptions, and other time-dependent cognitive phenomena.