Production and perception of the P<scp>in</scp>-P<scp>en</scp>merger

Austen, Martha

doi:10.1017/jlg.2020.9

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…Similarly, associations can be observed between race and dialects/ethnolects of English. For example, in the United States, PIN/PEN mergers occur more among African American speakers than White speakers, even in geographic areas where PIN/PEN mergers are more common (Austen, 2020; Labov, 2006). Together, the work from the past two paragraphs highlights the importance of real-world experience on forming sociolinguistic associations, as well as how these associations may influence our future listening experiences.…”

Section: Sociolinguistic Learningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Learning linguistic diversity: Listeners have race-based linguistic expectations, but only for phonological variation.

Ryken,

Tupper,

Weatherhead

2024

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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In three artificial language experiments, we explored the rate at which adults learned associations between linguistic variation and speaker characteristics. Within each of the experiments, we observed that listeners sociolinguistic learning occurred, regardless of whether the speaker characteristic is social (race and sex/gender) or nonsocial (hat wearing), or whether they heard a phonological or morphological variant. However, we found that listener's initial expectations of what social properties were predictive of linguistic variation differed, impacting overall performance. First, participants were much more likely to assume that a phonological variant was predicted by a social property than a nonsocial property (Experiment 1). Most interestingly, participants were more likely to privilege speaker race than sex/gender, but only in the case of a phonological variant (Experiments 2 and 3). The same effect was found in both White and Black participants, though White participants were more likely to correctly articulate which speaker characteristic explained the variation, suggesting that sociolinguistic learning hinges on real-world experiences with language and social diversity. Public Significance StatementSociolinguistic associations are formed when listeners link specific speech properties (e.g., accents and suffix use) with a specific speaker property (e.g., race and sex/gender), which in turn can influence their expectations of how a new person will speak. The present study suggests that some sociolinguistic associations may be learned more easily than others. To be more precise, listeners expect that speaker race is important to how speakers pronounce words, at least when compared to the social property sex/gender. Furthermore, the background and experiences of the listener may influence how they learn sociolinguistic associations. That is, the listener's own race or their experience with race may affect how quickly they form an association between a speaker's race and how they pronounce words. The results of this study highlight the importance of listeners' previous experiences with diversity on their future interactions with new speakers.

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Section: Sociolinguistic Learningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Learning linguistic diversity: Listeners have race-based linguistic expectations, but only for phonological variation.

Ryken,

Tupper,

Weatherhead

2024

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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“…Practically speaking, however, this method is known to be difficult to calibrate. For instance, several researchers have run into the issue of how to interpret results of participants who perform well above chance in accurately discriminating between words containing non-native regional contrasts (e.g., Austen 2020;Bowie 2000;Labov et al 1991;Thomas and Hay 2005). This has led on occasion to listeners who do not show 100% accuracy in distinguishing minimal pairs to be considered for analytic purposes as perceptually merged.…”

Section: Cross-dialectal Perception Of Mergersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Perceptual Discrimination of Phonemic Contrasts in Quebec French: Exposure to Quebec French Does Not Improve Perception in Hexagonal French Native Speakers Living in Quebec

Kunkel,

Passoni,

de Leeuw

2023

Languages

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In Quebec French, /a ~ ɑ/ and /ε ~ aε/ are phonemic, whereas in Hexagonal French, these vowels are merged to /a/ and /ε/, respectively. We tested the effects of extended exposure to Quebec French (QF) as a second dialect (D2) on Hexagonal French (HF) speakers’ abilities to perceive these contrasts. Three groups of listeners were recruited: (1) non-mobile HF speakers born and living in France (HF group); (2) non-mobile QF speakers born and living in Quebec (QF group); and mobile HF speakers having moved from France to Quebec (HF>QF group). To determine any fine-grained effects of second dialect (D2) exposure on the perception of vowel contrasts, participants completed a same–different discrimination task in which they listened to stimuli paired at different levels of acoustic similarity. As expected, QF listeners showed a significant advantage over the HF group in discriminating between /a ~ ɑ/ and /ε ~ aε/ pairs, thus suggesting an own-dialect advantage in perceptual discrimination. Interestingly, this own-dialect advantage appeared to be greater for the /ε ~ aε/ contrast. The QF listeners also showed an advantage over the HF>QF group, and, surprisingly, this advantage was greater than over the HF group. In other words, the results suggested that the acquisition of a second dialect did not enhance the abilities of listeners to perceive differences between phonemic contrasts in that D2. If anything, the acquisition of the D2 disadvantaged the perceptual abilities of the HF>QF group. This might be because these phonemes have, over time, become less acoustically marked for the HF>QF participants and have, potentially, become integrated into their D1 phonemic categories.

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“…Baranowski (2013), examining the pin-pen [I-ε] merger in Charleston, South Carolina, found that speakers were more likely to be merged in production than perception, although there was no significant difference between production and perception for cot-caught. Austen (2020), tracking the distribution of the pin-pen [I-ε] merger across the United States, found that almost all speakers who merged the two phones were still able to discriminate them above chance (but below 100% accuracy) in a two-alternative forced choice identification task. For the Ellen-Allen merger in New Zealand (Thomas and Hay, 2005;Hay et al, 2013), and for the cot-caught merger in Hawai'i and the western United States (Hay et al, 2013), speakers who were merged in production could still discriminate between both pairs in perception.…”

Section: Sound Change Trajectoriesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Within-Speaker Perception and Production of Two Marginal Contrasts in Illinois English

Zhang

Graham²,

Barlaz³

et al. 2022

Front. Commun.

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The notion of marginal contrasts and other gradient relations challenges the classification of phones as either contrastive phonemes or allophones of the same phoneme. The existence of “fuzzy” or “intermediate” contrasts has implications for language acquisition and sound change. In this research, we examine production and perception of two marginal contrasts [ɑ-ɔ] (“cot-caught”), where two original phonemes are undergoing a merger, and [ʌi-aɪ] (“writer-rider”), where a single original phoneme has arguably split into two contrastive sounds, albeit in a limited manner. Participants born and raised in Illinois were asked to provide recordings of cot-caught and writer-rider pairs embedded in sentences, followed by the target word in isolation. They then completed ABX and two-alternative forced choice two-alternative forced choice (2FC) perception tasks with stimuli produced by two native speakers from the Chicagoland area. Results showed that the [ʌi-aɪ] contrast, which has been defined as marginal in other work, is actually currently more phonetically and phonologically stable than [ɑ-ɔ] for the group of speakers that we have tested, with a more robust link between production and perception. The cot-caught merger appears to have progressed further, compared to what had previously been documented in the region. Our results and analysis suggest different sound change trajectories for phonological mergers, regarding the coupling of production and perception, as compared with phonemic splits.

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Production and perception of the Pin-Penmerger

Cited by 4 publications

References 25 publications

Learning linguistic diversity: Listeners have race-based linguistic expectations, but only for phonological variation.

Learning linguistic diversity: Listeners have race-based linguistic expectations, but only for phonological variation.

Perceptual Discrimination of Phonemic Contrasts in Quebec French: Exposure to Quebec French Does Not Improve Perception in Hexagonal French Native Speakers Living in Quebec

Within-Speaker Perception and Production of Two Marginal Contrasts in Illinois English

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