Co-author: Molly Babel
Spoken language presents listeners with a range of phonetic variation. Systematic categorical variation within/across languages/dialects exposes listeners to different pronunciation variants. My dissertation examines the pronunciation variants of a Cantonese sound change where syllable-initial /n/ (nou5 腦 "brain") is pronounced with [l] (occasionally producing homophones; lou5 腦 "brain"/ 老 "old"). Sociolinguistic work suggests that historical [n]-initial pronunciations are prestige variants, used in more formal contexts, and innovative [l]-initial pronunciations, while socially stigmatized, are more frequent and used in more casual contexts. Little work has examined the consequences of this sound change for speech perception and lexical processing. I test Cantonese listeners on the perception, recognition, and encoding of these sound change pronunciation variants across six experiments. An immediate repetition priming paradigm with [l]-initial targets (Experiment 1) demonstrates recognition equivalence between [n] and [l] forms, in spite of phonetic sensitivity to [n] and [l] evidenced in AX discrimination (Experiments 2a, 6a) and categorization tasks (Experiments 2b, 6b). A long distance repetition priming task (Experiment 3) establishes equivalence between [n] and [l] forms in long term recognition as well, with slightly more priming by historical [n], which I examine in an old-new recognition task (Experiment 4). The recognition task data with [l]-initial targets suggest that listeners dually map [n]- and [l]-initial pronunciation variants to a single lexical representation. An immediate priming task with [n]-initial targets (Experiment 5) demonstrates the same overall recognition equivalence, though, with slightly less priming across the board. This provides further evidence in favour of dual mapping, as [n] and [l] act to facilitate the recognition of each other. This work contributes to our understanding of the [n]-[l] sound change and uniquely situates the study of phonetic variation, traditionally studied through the lens of within-/cross- language/dialect pronunciation variants, in the context of diachronic sound change variants.
Co-authors: Fion Fung, Molly Babel
Sound contrasts are redundantly cued in the speech stream by acoustic features spanning various time scales. Listeners are presented with evidence for a particular category at various temporal intervals, and must coalesce this information into a coherent percept to accurately achieve recognition. Previous work on tone languages has shown that listeners prioritize consonants, then vowels, then lexical tone during phonological and word processing, despite lexical tone being a suprasegmental cue that unfolds with the vowel. We present an online eye-tracking study to assess the time course of Cantonese listeners’ recognition of a target word (e.g., 包 /pa͡u55/ ‘bun’) with competitors for rime (北 /pak55/ ‘north’), onset (敲 /ha͡u55/ ’to knock’), and tone (爆 /pa͡u33/ ‘to explode’) co-present on the screen. This design allows a test of the role of relative prioritization and contribution of consonant, vowel, and tone information in phonological processing. If vowels are prioritized before tones, we predict increased looking times to tone competitors. If vowels and tones are processed jointly, we predict equal looking times to both vowel and tone competitors. Data collection with Gorilla is ongoing. Data analysis will focus on overall proportions of looking-time to the target and competitors.