Speaker Age and Vowel Perception

Drager, Katie

doi:10.1177/0023830910388017

Cited by 92 publications

(108 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…The research described in this section provides evidence that the social characteristics attributed to the speaker can influence how phones are perceived. This suggests that phonetic representations are indexed to non-linguistic information and that this non-linguistic information is accessed during speech processing (Strand 1999;Campbell-Kibler 2007;Drager 2011b). Additionally, given the subtle phonetic differences between variants, the results provide evidence that the phonetic representation contains rich detail that previously was assumed to be filtered out during speech perception, storing only an abstracted form in the mental representation.…”

Section: Experimental Sociolinguisticsmentioning

confidence: 70%

“…There is evidence that the perception of phonetic variables can also be affected by other social characteristics attributed to the speaker, including dialect area (Niedzielski 1999;Hay, Nolan & Drager 2006), socioeconomic status (Hay, Warren & Drager 2006), age (Hay, Warren & Drager 2006;Drager 2006;2011b), and ethnicity (Casasanto 2010). The centring diphthongs /iə/ and /eə/, as in the words near and square, are undergoing a merger in NZE.…”

Section: Experimental Sociolinguisticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Linguistic variation, identity construction and cognition

K.¹

2015

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Section: Experimental Sociolinguisticsmentioning

confidence: 70%

Section: Experimental Sociolinguisticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Linguistic variation, identity construction and cognition

K.¹

2015

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“…As well as the age effects shown in the studies of NZE near and square by Hay et al (2006b) and Warren et al (2007), Drager (2011) found that the speaker's perceived age influenced the categorization of vowels on a dress-trap continuum in NZE, a variety which has a well-established pattern of raising of the short front vowels. However, she found this effect only for older participants, which she conjectures may be linked to their greater experience of a range of speakers from different generations as well as to their greater exposure to the progression of the sound change.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 88%

The interpretation of prosodic variability in the context of accompanying sociophonetic cues

Warren

2017

Laboratory Phonology

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Production data have shown that one of the features distinguishing uptalk rises from question rises in New Zealand English (NZE) is the alignment point of the rise start, which is earlier in question utterances realized by younger speakers. Previous research has indicated that listeners are sensitive to this distinction in making a forced-choice decision as to whether an utterance is a statement or a question. NZE is also characterized by an ongoing merger of the near and square diphthongs, with younger speakers more likely to realize the vowel in a word such as care with a closer starting point (as in [iɘ], overlapping with their realization of the near vowel), whereas older speakers would have more open starting point (as in [eɘ]). The current study uses the mouse-tracking paradigm to provide evidence that the realization of square with an innovative vs. a conservative variant in a word early in an utterance affects NZE listeners' sensitivity firstly to a rise as a potential signal of an uptalked statement and secondly to the early alignment of the rise as a signal of a question. This finding indicates that the interpretation of prosodic variability can depend on speaker characteristics imputed from other sociophonetic cues.

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“…More importantly, listeners do so even when merely told to imagine that the speaker is a man versus a woman (Johnson et al 1999). Similar effects of listeners' expectations regarding the identity of the speaker on their interpretation of the speaker's speech have been found with expectations regarding other indexical information, such as speaker's age, race, or even occupation (Drager 2005(Drager , 2011Koops et al 2008;Pexaman and Olineck 2002;Staum Casasanto 2008).…”

Section: The Role Of Input In Shaping Expectationsmentioning

confidence: 76%

“…Experience can also differ even within the same language community. Drager (2011) found that age expectations influence vowel perception in older but not younger participants, presumably because older adults had greater experience and awareness of the merger in progress in the community than the younger adults. Perhaps the most direct link between individual differences in experience and performance can be seen in a study that examined individual differences in people's community make-up (Lev-Ari & Peperkamp in press).…”

Section: The Role Of Input In Shaping Expectationsmentioning

confidence: 89%

Studying individual differences in the social environment to better understand language learning and processing

Lev‐Ari

2016

Linguistics Vanguard

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People learn language from their social environment. Therefore, individual differences in the input that their social environment provides could influence their linguistic performance. Nevertheless, investigation of the role of individual differences in input on performance has been mostly restricted to first and second language acquisition. In this paper I argue that individual differences in input can influence linguistic performance even in adult native speakers. Specifically, differences in input can affect performance by influencing people's knowledgebase, by modulating their processing manner, and by shaping expectations. Therefore, studying the role that individual differences in input play can improve our understanding of how language is learned, processed and represented.Keywords: individual differences, social networks, PsychLingvarOne of the main goals of psycholinguistic research is to understand how we make sense of incoming input and manage to transform it into meaningful utterances. On the face of it, this is a task that most of us seem to succeed at, yet a closer look reveals great variation in the degree of success at different aspects of the task, from speech perception to the comprehension of pragmatic intentions. So far, the study of individual differences in language processing has mostly focused on differences due to variation in cognitive skills. Much less attention has been devoted to individual differences in the social environment, and in particular, to differences in the properties of the input it provides, especially among adult native speakers. In this paper, I argue that the characteristics of the input that people receive play an important role in shaping their linguistic performance. I will focus on three manners by which input can do so: by influencing the knowledgebase that feeds the analysis of incoming language, by influencing the manner of processing, such as the mechanisms that are relied on and the cues that are attended to during language processing, and by shaping expectations, which, in turn, influence performance. From noise to structured differencesThe realization that individual differences in performance can be informative about language processing and representation and are not merely noise that needs to be reduced has only gained popularity in Psycholinguistics over the last couple of decades. For many decades, experimental studies in psycholinguistics, as well as in other fields, focused on the commonalities, on how people in general perform certain tasks, and how the average participant is influenced by certain manipulations. Individual differences in performance were treated as noise. After all, by definition, participants' score on any task is composed of their "true" score and the measurement error, and so differences might simply be noise. If the experiment is conducted well, the measurement errors should cancel each other, and the general trend would be discovered. It is only in the 90s that the systematicity in this "noise" has started to be explo...

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Speaker Age and Vowel Perception

Cited by 92 publications

References 28 publications

Linguistic variation, identity construction and cognition

Linguistic variation, identity construction and cognition

The interpretation of prosodic variability in the context of accompanying sociophonetic cues

Studying individual differences in the social environment to better understand language learning and processing

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