Exploring Sound Change Over Time: A Review of Computational and Human Perception

TL;DR

This work addresses how to bridge computational and human perception of sound change by reviewing methods and datasets for historical versus ongoing changes. It surveys computational techniques—such as diachronic embeddings, phoneme-level translation, and markedness modeling—and contrasts them with human perceptual methods that use listener judgments to study convergence. The authors argue for a unified perspective that leverages computer-aided perception and cross-dataset analysis to reveal links between past and present changes, and they discuss applications in phylogenetic inference and dataset quality assessment. The findings highlight the complementary strengths and limitations of each approach and emphasize that a multi-level, entangled view of phonology, syntax, and semantics is essential for a robust understanding of language change.

Abstract

Computational and human perception are often considered separate approaches for studying sound changes over time; few works have touched on the intersection of both. To fill this research gap, we provide a pioneering review contrasting computational with human perception from the perspectives of methods and tasks. Overall, computational approaches rely on computer-driven models to perceive historical sound changes on etymological datasets, while human approaches use listener-driven models to perceive ongoing sound changes on recording corpora. Despite their differences, both approaches complement each other on phonetic and acoustic levels, showing the potential to achieve a more comprehensive perception of sound change. Moreover, we call for a comparative study on the datasets used by both approaches to investigate the influence of historical sound changes on ongoing changes. Lastly, we discuss the applications of sound change in computational linguistics, and point out that perceiving sound change alone is insufficient, as many processes of language change are complex, with entangled changes at syntactic, semantic, and phonetic levels.