Automatization and Sound Change

This chapter reviews research on automatization, both in the domain of action execution and in the domain of perception / comprehension. In comprehension, automatization is argued to lead to inability to direct conscious attention towards frequently used intermediate steps on the way from sound to meaning (leading to findings such as the missing letter effect). As a result, the cues we use to access meaning may be the cues we are least aware of. Chain and hierarchical representations of action sequences are compared. The chain model is argued to be under-appreciated as an execution-level representation for well-practiced sequences. Automatization of a sequence repeated in a fixed order is argued to turn a hierarchy into a chain. Execution-level representations for familiar words are argued to be networks of interlinked chains (connected through propagation filters) rather than hierarchies. Much of sound change is argued to be the result of automatization of word execution, throughout life, tempered by reinforcement learning (selection by consequences).