UCLA

The principle of faithfulness, proposed in the Optimality Theoretic framework of phonology, has traditionally been based on binary distinctive features and discrete sound correspondences within an input–output pair. The subsequent proposal of the P-map has

inspired a different approach to faithfulness—one that allows phonological grammars to evaluate faithfulness directly using the phonetic distance between different continuous speech streams, maximally preserving the subtle phonetic difference among output candidates. This paper presents a study that aims to determine whether the distance-based approach to faithfulness can better account for gradient alternation patterns than the traditional feature-based approach can. The phenomenon this study examines is rime rhotacization in Beijing Mandarin. Results of an experiment where participants were asked to choose which rime to rhotacize in nonce disyllables reveal that speakers choose to rhotacize the rime which yields the more faithful output. The results were modeled with mixed-effects logistic regression. One model incorporated feature-based faithfulness constraints and the other distance-based ones. The models confirmed that the faithfulness of rhotacization candidates is the main deciding factor. However, two independent model comparison measures yielded contradictory results regarding which model performed better, leaving an inclusion in regard to whether distance-based faithfulness is more capable than feature-based faithfulness.