Perception of speaker age and speaker origin in a sound change in progress: The case of /s/-aspiration in Andalusian Spanish

Abstract

This paper addresses the question whether listeners possess sociolinguistic knowledge of regional variation in a sound change affecting /s/ + voiceless stop sequences in Andalusian Spanish. We tested whether speakers from Seville and Granada were perceived as more Sevillian-sounding and as younger when a stimulus contained the novel phonetic variant, a post-aspirated stop. Word-medial syllable-final /s/ was manipulated in such a way that two stimuli of the same speaker differed only in whether they contained pre-aspiration ([eh.ˈtaŋ.ko]) or post-aspiration ([e.ˈthaŋ.ko]). Andalusian listeners rated the same speaker as younger and as more Sevillian-sounding when the stimulus contained a post-aspirated stop. The recognition of a speaker’s actual dialect was particularly high when the innovative variant was embedded in a Seville speaker’s speech, confirming earlier work that indexicality is context-specific. The results suggest that Andalusian listeners possess knowledge of the regional variation and the sound change and use this variation in social perception.

Intra-regional differences in the social perception of allophonic variation: The evaluation of [tʃ] and [ʃ] in Huelva and Lepe (Western Andalucía)

“…As there is ample evidence of dialect levelling of traditional Andalusian features in syllable-onset position in favor of supra-local features throughout Andalucía (Hernández Campoy & Villena Ponsoda, 2009;Moya Corral, 2018b;Villena Ponsoda & Vida Castro, 2020; inter alia), future studies should look to conduct perception studies of these variants in order to shed light into the social motivation for such dialect levelling of traditional features. Additionally, more studies should not only analyze specific communities, but compare specific communities within larger regions (Ruch, 2018a, Ruch, 2018b as well as nearby communities (Watson & Clark, 2013) in order to find more nuanced evaluations of linguistic variables that would be overlooked in larger regional labels such as Andalusians, Pennsylvanians, Texans, or Southerners. In conclusion, the current study has demonstrated that while the communities of Huelva and Lepe share similar language attitudes in evaluating the supra-local Castilian feature [tʃ] as more overtly prestigious than the traditional Andalusian feature [ʃ], there are nuanced differences in attitudes between the two communities due to their unique historical and socioeconomic developments.…”

“…Recent sociolinguistic work utilizing a modified matched-guise test (Lambert, Hodgson, Gardner & Fillenbaum, 1960) has demonstrated that a single phonetic variable or a single word phonological switch is sufficient information for a listener to modify their social evaluations 4 of a speaker (Barnes, 2015;Campbell Kibler, 2007;Chappell, 2016;Walker, García, Cortés & Campbell Kibler, 2014). Other studies have demonstrated that even when listeners are only given a one-word stimulus, they are able to make fairly accurate inferences towards the ethnicity of the speaker or the regional identity of the speaker (Purnell, Idsardi & Baugh, 1999;Ruch, 2018a). Furthermore, these studies have demonstrated that speaker and listener characteristics influence the social evaluation of linguistic variants.…”

The role of familiarity on within-person age judgements from voices

“…Notably, we asked listeners to make their judgements of perceived age on based on within-person age contrasts, i.e., using two voice recordings from the same person. We opted for this design to minimise the effects of socio-phonetic and socio-linguistic cues that may be diagnostic of a speakers' age in cross-sectional voice samples, when asking listeners to perceive age across different voices (e.g., Ruch, 2018). This choice will have in turn minimised the salience of a set of cues to speaker age that would have been available to listeners in cross-sectional samples.…”

“…If listeners are able to perceive such tell-tale socio-phonetic cues, age perception judgements become influenced by features that are relatively independent of the sound of the voice itself. One example of the influence of such socio-phonetic cues on age perception is described by Ruch (2018): Listeners perceive a voice recording that includes a phonetic feature that is primarily used by younger people (aspirated /s/ in Andalusian Spanish) as being younger than the very same recording from which this feature had been removed. To minimise the effects of such socio-phonetic cues and to focus on age perception based on the sound of the voice, longitudinal voice samples are better suited, where the same person's voice has been sampled at different time points.…”

The Role of Acoustic Distance and Sociolinguistic Knowledge in Dialect Identification

“…The finding that listeners more easily identified their own over other dialects ( Williams et al, 1999 ; Gooskens, 2005 ; Boomershine, 2006 ; Baker et al, 2009 ; Yan, 2015 ; Avanzi and Boula de Mareüil, 2017 ) has also been explained with exposure and experience ( Clopper and Pisoni, 2004a ; Baker et al, 2009 ; Yan, 2015 ). An alternative explanation, however, is that an own-dialect bias accounts for the higher accuracy (see Ruch , in press ), similar to an own-age bias in the recognition of speaker age ( Moyse et al, 2014 ). The present paper will specifically address this question.…”