Linguistic knowledge and language performance in English article variant preference

The New Cockney

“…Words spelt with the initial <h> in an unstressed syllable have the option of occurring with 'a' or 'an' according to dictionaries and standard grammars (Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech and Svartvik 1985), for example a/an historical moment, a/an hotel. However, it is often only considered acceptable to use 'an' if the 'h' is unpronounced in these words, leaving them vowel initial and hence not really an exception to the standard rule (Raymond, Fisher and Healy 2002). In any case, the use of this codicil tends to be associated with more formal speech or is perhaps becoming less used and does not therefore have much relevance to the current study.…”

“…They conclude that this 'appears to be an ongoing change in a pronunciation norm' (Keating et al 1994: 136-137). Raymond et al (2002) also looked at the TIMIT corpus and found that there were no deviations from the standard rule for production of the indefinite article variants 'a' and 'an'. As they note, this is not a surprising result given that the sentences were read from a text by the participants and the alternations of the indefinite articles would have been present orthographically.…”

“…In a psycholinguistic experimental study among undergraduates at the University of Colorado, Raymond et al (2002) examined the factors influencing the production of definite and indefinite articles, this time in tasks which did not involve exposing the participants to written materials other than the written instructions. Each participant was asked to listen to words said with the possessive pronoun 'his' which they then had to replace with an article, either 'the' or 'a'/'an', followed by the word they had heard with the possessive pronoun.…”

“…This is seen in a number of other function words, such as 'there', 'then', 'those' and 'that'. The reduced pronunciation 'thuh' /ðə/ was derived from 'thee' /ðiː/ as a subsequent development through a process of vowel reduction and grammaticalised in standard Modern English before consonantinitial words but not vowel-initial words (Raymond et al 2002).…”

Strategy shifts in classification skill acquisition: Does memory retrieval dominate rule use?

“…Specifically, most participants preferred a rule-based strategy in what was called a natural task condition. This task was called natural because it involved a linguistic rule for pronunciation of English words (i.e., participants had to choose one of two pronunciations, "thee" or "thuh," for the definite article the, depending on a given noun or adjective; see Raymond, Fisher, & Healy, 2002, for evidence that college students are not fully knowledgeable about this rule despite its presence in all English dictionaries). In contrast, most participants eventually preferred a memory-based strategy in an artificial task condition (in which participants had to base their response on whether meaningless letter strings conformed to an alphabetical sequence).…”