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

Word-level prominence and “stress deafness” in Maltese English bilinguals

This study investigates “stress deafness” in bilingual speakers of Maltese and Maltese English. Although both reportedly have lexical stress, the acoustic cues to prominence appear to be relatively weak. Further, word-initial pitch peaks make pitch an unreliable cue to lexical stress, which can be elsewhere in the word. In a sequence recall task, we show that speakers dominant in Maltese exhibit a classic “stress deafness” effect, similar to speakers of French. Speakers who identify as balanced or Maltese English dominant have more diverse results and do not show such a strong tendency towards “stress deafness”. These speakers may rely on their exposure to other varieties of English to identify (and recall) word prominences. This study suggests that the nature of stress in Maltese might need to be revisited.peer-reviewe

The urge to unmerge: a case of structural change across the lifespan

This paper considers change across the lifespan by investigating an adult speaker’s development from a one-part low back vowel system to a two-part system. Specifically, we use podcast data to track the realtime development of a LOT-THOUGHT split in the speech of an American English speaker who previously exhibited a merged system in production. Using automatic forced alignment, we extracted measures of the first and second formants. Degree of overlap was analysed using lmers and Pillai scores. Analysis revealed that the speaker’s one-part system diverged into two statistically significantly distinct categories, coming to resemble the dominant pattern of the region in which he resides. As previous work indicates that grammatical plasticity is constrained in adulthood, the current finding contributes a new insight into the nature of post-critical period change. These findings are discussed within the broader context of underlying phonological representations and motivations behind language change across the adult lifespan