Responding to accents after experiencing interactive or mediated speech

Very little known is about how speakers learn about and/or respond to speech experienced without the possibility for interaction. This paper reports an experiment which considers the effects of two kinds of exposure to speech (interactive or non-interactive mediated) on Scottish English speakers’ responses to another accent (Southern British English), for two processing tasks, phonological awareness and speech production. Only marginal group effects are found according to exposure type. The main findings show a difference between subjects according to exposure type before exposure, and individual shifts in responses to speech according to exposure type

Listening with style: The effect of bidialectal style-shifting on PRICE vowel perception in Britain’s Black Country

Speech perception research has found that manipulating listener attitudes towards a dialect area can lead to convergence or divergence in production style, as well as a simultaneous convergence or divergence in perception. The present study investigates whether these two effects are connected, such that the changes in production style are the cause of changes in perception. The potential link is interrogated directly through an experiment which pushes participants’ stylistic production towards the extreme ends of their repertoires, followed by a perceptual test in which they match vowel tokens to a vowel line-up resynthesized along the same standard- dialect continuum. Analysis of the data shows that style does affect perception: as participants are asked to switch from a more standard to a more dialectal style, their perceptual categories shift towards the standard end of the vowel continuum, i.e., when they speak in dialect, vowels are more likely to be rated as standard-sounding, and vice-versa

Cot in the Act: Speaker Ethnicity Conditions Lexical Identification in the Context of the Low-Back Merger in New York City English

This paper reports on an experiment designed to measure how listeners\u27s perceptions of speaker age and ethnicity condition identification of lexical items with THOUGHT/LOT vowels in New York City English (NYCE). Several independent studies have recently reported evidence of THOUGHT-lowering and/or LOT/THOUGHT merging in NYCE led by younger non-White speakers. Spoken corpus data by Wong (2012), Becker (2010) and Haddican et al. (2021) suggest rapid THOUGHT lowering, particularly in Asian and Latinx communities. Similarly, younger Asian and Latinx NYCE speakers favor merged LOT/THOUGHT responses in controlled homophony judgment tasks (Johnson 2010, Haddican et al. 2016). Moreover, matched-guise results by Becker (2014) suggest that raised THOUGHT is associated mainly with older White speakers. Unaddressed in this literature is whether listeners use perceived social information about the speaker--i.e. perceptions of age and ethnicity--in their phonemic categorization of low back vowels in comprehension of NYCE (Rubin 1992, Hay, Warren and Drager 2006, Koops 2011). Here, we report results from a forced-choice lexical identification experiment intended to investigate this. Consistent with previous production and matched guise results, judges tended to misidentify LOT auditory stimulus items as THOUGHT more often when the item was accompanied by a photo of an Asian speaker than a White speaker. The analysis revealed no effect for the age comparison. The results suggest that NYCE-native listeners actively use social information about speaker ethnicity in the categorization of LOT/THOUGHT items in comprehension

The Lowering of Raised-THOUGHT and the Low-Back Distinction in New York City: Evidence from Chinese Americans

This paper examines the production of the thought and lot vowel classes by New Yorkers of Chinese heritage. Sixteen New York-born Chinese American males between the ages of 11 and 61 were sampled. About 600 thought and lot tokens were instrumentally measured and normalized for statistical analyses and plotting. A linear regression analysis and a correlation test find evidence of the reversal of thought-raising. The height (normalized F1) of thought lowers as speaker’s year of birth increases. In other words, older Chinese New Yorkers are more likely to produce thought-raising than the younger ones. The finding corroborates Becker’s (2010) results from European New Yorkers. To determine how the lowering of thought may have affected the low back distinction in New York City English, this study utilized the Pillai-Bartlette trace and the Euclidean distance between lot and thought as measurements of the magnitude of the low back distinction, along with visual examination of individual vowel plots. Despite the lowering of thought across apparent-time, most, if not all, speakers continue to maintain the low back distinction. However, the lot and thought classes for a few younger speakers are very close in the vowel space with some overlapping tokens. Their low back vowels configuration resembles the patterns exhibited by the “transitional speakers” in the Midland area in Labov et al. (2006), whose thought and lot classes are neither completely merged nor completely distinct. These results call for further work on the low back vowels of speakers of other social and ethnic groups in order to investigate the future trajectory of the thought vowel vis-à-vis the robustness of the low back distinction in the English of New York City

Assessing merged status with Pillai scores based on dynamic formant contours

When Pillai scores are used to study vowel mergers, formants are typically sampled from the midpoint. This study compares alternative methods for calculating Pillai scores: methods that incorporate dynamic spectral information. Eighteen speakers produced 20 tokens of Hodd and hawed. Formants were sampled at 20–35–50–65–80% duration. Seven Pillai scores were calculated, each based on a different subset of those samples with temporal pooling: (i) onsets, (ii) heads, (iii) midpoints, (iv) onsets + offsets, (v) heads + tails, (vi) onsets + midpoints + offsets, and (vii) all five. Subjects also completed a vowel identification task, and the rate of identifying one low-back vowel as the other was calculated. The results of the identification task were regressed on each Pillai score separately to identify the one with the highest correlation, through model selection. Dynamic formant contours performed better than static formant values, with midpoint sampling performing worst of all. Directions are discussed for basic research on Pillai scores in phonetics

Mapping Production and Perception in Regional Vowel Shifts

Drawing from data from a multi-region US vowel production and perception study, we investigate the extent to which vowel production and perception are related for talkers from Memphis, Tennessee. Focusing on the mid-front vowels and the variable degree of Southern Vowel Shift (SVS) exhibited productively by thirteen individuals, the study investigates the role of individual variation in perception. We show both that individuals who participate more strongly in the SVS have more shifted perceptual systems and that perceptual shift can operate somewhat independently from productive shift. We further consider our data in terms of the proposal by Sumner and Samuel (2009) that dialects should be understood as having three components, production, perception, and representation, and not simply in terms of production