Mády, Katalin

Rácz, Péter

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Attitude as a dimension of sound changeKatalin Ma´dy1 & Pe´ter Ra´cz2Institute for Linguistics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences1, Eo¨tvo¨s Lora´nd University2mady.katalin@nytud.mta.hu, petermartonracz@gmail.comIntroduction. The quantity opposition in the Hungarian vowel system has been subjectto changes in the last decades, resulting in a shortening and eventual neutralisation of longhigh vowels in unstressed position. This was an ongoing sound change process around1960, as was shown in [4]. The duration ratio of long and short vowels has generallydecreased compared to other quantity languages such as Slovak [1].[3] investigated in a perception experiment to what extent tenseness information wasused for distinguishing between long and short vowels. The study included old and younglisteners who were also tested for their explicit and implicit attitude towards languageusage. Both age and implicit attitude were relevant factors in the perception of vowelquantity: old and conservative listeners relied more strongly on the tenseness cue whenidentifying long and short vowels, but only in ustressed position.However, age-related differences in the perception of F1 and F2 do not necessarilyreflect a sound change process. It was shown in [2] that both F1 and F2 tend to becomelower with increasing age, when speech samples of the same speaker are compared. It ispossible that listeners are biased by their own vowel production when identifying vowelsand that their judgements are interrelated with their own vowel space. In this study,vowel production of old and young speakers was compared and related to the midpointof their articulatory space.Methods. Target words contained long /o/ and /u/ in stressed and unstressed positionand were embedded in meaningful carrier sentences. Sentences were read by 25 speakers(12 above 50 years, 13 in the age of 18–20 years), where gender was evenly distributedbetween groups. Speakers were tested for their implicit linguistic attitude by the samemethod as described in [3]. Additionally, the sustained vowels /a e i o u/ were recordedfrom all speakers. All sentences and sustained vowels were read 5 times. Results wereanalysed by linear mixed effect models, with the fixed effects age and implicit attitudeand random factor speaker.Results. First, the centroid of the vowel space for each speaker was calculated (mean ofF1 and F2 for the sustained vowels /a i u/, respectively). Age and implicit attitude andtheir interaction had a significant effect on both F1 and F2 of the centroid (p < 0.05).There was an overall shift towards lower vowels in the speech of both young and liberalspeakers with a tendency for centralisation (see Fig. 1).The comparison of F1 and F2 of embedded vowels showed a similar tendency: bothformants were significantly higher for young and liberal speakers .Discussion. We can account for the effect of attitude on F1 and F2 variation if we assumean exemplar-based model of production, in which variants are labelled for speaker, style,and context (amongst other things), and production is based on a random sampling of asound category [5]. In such a model, differences that mostly follow from biological changesrelated to the aging of the vocal tract [2] can be re-interpreted as being distributed on anolder/conservative–younger/liberal axis. According to the findings of [6], information onwhether a word is used more by older or younger speakers is available for the individual.We argue that this is also true for phonetic concomitants of age, suggesting that theconnection between age and attitude in a sound change process is a relevant and complexone.ae oi u2500 2000 1500 1000 5001000800600400200Sustained vowels and ageF2 (Hz)F1 (Hz)aoi ue1000800600400200F1 (Hz)oldyoungai ue o2500 2000 1500 1000 5001000800600400200Sustained vowels and attitudeF2 (Hz)F1 (Hz)aoiue1000800600400200F1 (Hz)conservativeliberalFigure 1: Vowel space based on sustained vowels, according to left: age, right: implicitlinguistic attitude.References[1] Sˇtefan Benˇusˇ and Katalin Ma´dy. Stress and phonemic length in the perception ofSlovak vowels. In Speech Prosody Conference, pages PS3A–14, Shanghai, 2012.[2] Jonathan Harrington, Sallyanne Palethorpe, and Catherine Watson. Age-relatedchanges in fundamental frequency and formants: a longitudinal study of four speakers.In Interspeech, Antwerp, 2007.[3] Katalin Ma´dy. Implicit and explicit language attitude in a sound change process. InProc. 2nd Sound Change Conference, page 87, Kloster Seeon, Germany, 2012.[4] Kla´ra Magdics. A szo´ve´gi maga´nhangzo´k ro¨vidu¨le´se a ko¨znyelvben. Nyelvtudoma´nyiKo¨zleme´nyek, 62:301–324, 1960.[5] Janet Pierrehumbert. Exemplar dynamics: Word frequency, lenition and contrast.Typological studies in language, 45:137–158, 2001.[6] Abby Walker and Jennifer Hay. Congruence between ‘word age’and ‘voice age’ facili-tates lexical access. Laboratory Phonology, 2(1):219–237, 2011.

Attitude as a dimension of sound change

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Attitude as a dimension of sound change

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