In ‘Using acoustic-phonetic simulations to model historical sound change’, published in Diachronica, Hudson, Wei and Coleman present some applications of speech morphing to model potential reconstructions of historical sound changes.  At the core of the speech morphing method is the use of audio interpolations from two acoustic recordings, generating a series of sound files representing fine-grained changes between one attested word form and another.  To illustrate the application of these methods, two case studies of perception experiments are presented: the development of left-to-right stress in Old to Classical Latin, and the evolution of the short diphthongs in Old English.  Finally, the quantitative approach to historical reconstructions described in this paper allows the rate and magnitude of sound-changes to be modelled, which leads the authors to argue that phonological changes likely progress in a saltatory, rather than incremental fashion.

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