Paul Boersma’s writings on listener-oriented production

In the framework of Functional Phonology (1998), the speaker takes into account the needs of the listener. This is implemented by a reversal of the traditional order of representations:

Underlying form -> { Articulatory form -> Auditory form -> Phonological surface form }

The third arrow is the speaker's view of how the listener will perceive the speaker's utterance.

1. Listener-oriented faithfulness

Listener-oriented faithfulness constraints evaluate the extent to which (the speaker thinks that) the listener will be able to reconstruct the intended underlying form without lexical access:

1998/09/14
book 		Functional phonology: Formalizing the interactions between articulatory and perceptual drives.
Ph.D. dissertation, University of Amsterdam, 504 pages.
A hardcopy edition is available from the author for free!
For more detail on separate chapters, and scripts, see Functional Phonology (1998).

Listener-oriented faithfulness evaluates recoverability:

1999/10/04 On the need for a separate perception grammar.
Rutgers Optimality Archive 358, 30 pages. [Abstract]
2000/12/29 The OCP in the perception grammar.
Rutgers Optimality Archive 435. 52 pages.

2. Control loop

Listener-oriented production makes sure that every case of neutralization on the surface is captured by a faithfulness constraint:

2000/12/29 The OCP in the perception grammar.
Rutgers Optimality Archive 435. 52 pages.
2003/04/09 Overt forms and the control of comprehension.
In Jennifer Spenader, Anders Eriksson & Östen Dahl (eds.): Proceedings of the Stockholm Workshop on Variation within Optimality Theory, April 26-27, 2003, pp. 47–56. Department of Linguistics, Stockholm University.

3. Probabilistic faithfulness

Listener-oriented faithfulness constraints can be probabilistic. They then evaluate the probability that the listener will not be able to reconstruct the intended underlying form. Although these constraints appear in Functional Phonology (1998), they were explicitly defined in the following papers, where they have the effect of phonetic enhancement of phonological features.

2000/12/29 The OCP in the perception grammar.
Rutgers Optimality Archive 435. 52 pages.
2003 The odds of eternal optimization in Optimality Theory.
In D. Eric Holt (ed.): Optimality Theory and language change, 31–65. Dordrecht: Kluwer. [Abstract]
Earlier version: Rutgers Optimality Archive 429, 2000/12/13.
2003/04/09 Overt forms and the control of comprehension.
In Jennifer Spenader, Anders Eriksson & Östen Dahl (eds.): Proceedings of the Stockholm Workshop on Variation within Optimality Theory, April 26-27, 2003, pp. 47–56. Department of Linguistics, Stockholm University.
2005/02/11 Paul Boersma & Silke Hamann:
The violability of backness in retroflex consonants.
Rutgers Optimality Archive 713, 28 pages.

4. The disadvantage

Probabilistic faithfulness constraints have to be ranked by the probability of confusion. The drawbacks of this are: (1) no known learning algorithm; (2) a duplication of the ranking of auditory cue constraints in the perception grammar. These two problems are solved by the framework of Parallel Bidirectional Phonology and Phonetics (BiPhon), which does not use a control loop but instead evaluates the Surface form, the Auditory form and the Articulatory form in parallel and still exhibits effects of listener orientation.

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