Intraspeaker Priming across the New Zealand English Short Front Vowel Shift

Abstract

A growing body of research in psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics, and sociolinguistics shows that we have a strong tendency to repeat linguistic material that we have recently produced, seen, or heard. The present paper investigates whether priming effects manifest in continuous phonetic variation the way it has been reported in phonological, morphological, and syntactic variation. We analyzed nearly 60,000 tokens of vowels involved in the New Zealand English short front vowel shift (SFVS), a change in progress in which trap/dress move in the opposite direction to kit, from a topic-controlled corpus of monologues (166 speakers), to test for effects that are characteristic of priming phenomena: repetition, decay, and lexical boost. Our analysis found evidence for all three effects. Tokens that were relatively high and front tended to be followed by tokens that were also high and front; the repetition effect weakened with greater time between the prime and target; and the repetition effect was stronger if the prime and target belonged to (different tokens of) the same word. Contrary to our expectations, however, the cross-vowel effects suggest that the repetition effect responded not to the direction of vowel changes within the SFVS, but rather the peripherality of the tokens. We also found an interaction between priming behavior and gender, with stronger repetition effects among men than women. While these findings both indicate that priming manifests in continuous phonetic variation and provide further evidence that priming is among the factors providing structure to intraspeaker variation, they also challenge unitary accounts of priming phenomena.

Intra- and interspeaker repetitiveness in Chengdu Mandarin locative variation

“…In both cases we would characterize the duration of the repetitiveness effect as fairly long-lasting, extending over multiple intervening sentences. Generally speaking, the degree of durability here seems similar to previous results from other morphological and syntactic variables (Gries, 2005; Szmrecsanyi, 2006), but longer-lasting than corpus persistence in vowel peripherality (Villarreal & Clark, 2022).…”

“…Lexical repetition can also enhance persistence when the words being repeated contain the variable (as opposed to themselves being embedded in word order alternants). Tamminga (2016) found that persistence in both (ING) variation and coronal stop deletion was stronger in cases where the prime and target were the same word, while Villarreal and Clark (2022) similarly found that persistence in New Zealand English vowel changes was enhanced when prime and target repeated the same lexical item. In the extreme, persistence may be absent (or at least too weak to detect) when potential primes and targets are too dissimilar.…”

“…Such a lexical boost is a parallel, then, between experimental priming and corpus persistence. As such, it has been argued to support the idea that persistence in conversational speech arises automatically from heightened activation after exposure and thus preferential retrieval for subsequent use—in other words, that persistence is priming (Clark, 2018; Pickering & Garrod, 2017; Szmrecsanyi, 2006; Tamminga, 2016; Villarreal & Clark, 2022). For example, Clark pointed to a lexical boost as one of the “clear signatures of priming” (2018:731) that can be used to recognize priming in conversational speech.…”

“…This dampening of the effect of repetitiveness over time is often referred to as decay . Decay has been observed, for example, for /th/-fronting in Scottish English (Clark, 2014), (ING) variation (but not monomorphemic coronal stop deletion) in Philadelphia English (Tamminga, 2016), and New Zealand English /t/-flapping and vowel shifts (Clark, 2018; Villarreal & Clark, 2022). Gries (2005) and Szmrecsanyi (2006) both found that corpus repetitiveness of syntactic alternations (such as English datives and particle placement) tended to decay logarithmically, declining sharply over one or two sentences and then leveling off.…”

“…Gries (2005) and Szmrecsanyi (2006) both found that corpus repetitiveness of syntactic alternations (such as English datives and particle placement) tended to decay logarithmically, declining sharply over one or two sentences and then leveling off. Villarreal and Clark found that persistence of vowel peripherality “diminishes considerably” by around 670 milliseconds after the prime (2022:726), while Tamminga (2016) found that (ING) persistence decayed more slowly. We are not aware of corpus-based studies that isolate the decay profile of convergence in a way that exactly parallels the corpus-based persistence studies, but there is some evidence for long-lasting phonetic convergence in naturalistic data.…”