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

Abstract

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.

Implicit effects of regional cues on the interpretation of intonation by Corsican French listeners

“…Specifically, it uses a perception study to test whether a particular sentence-final intonation contour in French is interpreted differently depending on which dialect region (Corsica or Continental France) is activated during processing. The present study differs from Warren (2017), however, in that the social cue manipulation is implicit. As with , in other words, the relevant cues are not attributable by the listeners to the social identity of the speaker.…”

“…Most studies on social priming in perception concern either (i) how gradient phonetic variation relates to two neighboring phonemes (e.g., Johnson et al, 1999;Drager, 2011), or (ii) the perceived phonetic quality of a given phoneme (e.g., Niedzielski, 1999;. Warren (2017), however, recently extended the program to the relationship between intonation and illocutionary meaning. In that study, New Zealand English listeners were presented with two types of final rising contour and were then asked to choose between a 'question' or a 'statement' meaning for the utterance.…”

“…Existing studies differ widely in terms of the nature of the social cues that are employed. For most studies, these cues are directly relatable to the social identity of the speaker (e.g., Johnson, et al, 1999;Warren, 2017), while only a few studies German, 2017) have explored the role of social cues that are completely unrelated to the speaker or the task. Finally, all such studies that we are aware of, with the exceptions of Chang (2015) and Dufour, Kriegel, Alleesaib, and Nguyen (2014), involve varieties of English.…”

“…Related accounts suggest that learning and behavior for other levels of representation depend on linguistic experience in a similar way, including the syntactic parsing of word strings (Bod, 2006(Bod, , 2009, alignments between abstract phonological categories in production (German, Carlson, & Pierrehumbert, 2013), morphophonological productivity (Pierrehumbert, 2002), morphological productivity (Rácz et al, 2017), and the semantic interpretation of wordforms (Bybee, 2006). Warren (2017) provides the first evidence that the interpretation of intonational forms depends on social cues. In that study, the relevant social cues (related to speaker age) concerned the specific quality of vowels within the same utterance as the intonational feature being investigated and were therefore attributable not only to the speaker's social identity, but also to the likelihood that the speaker used an early rising pattern as a question versus a late rising pattern as an uptalk statement.…”

“…Like Warren (2017), the present study also seeks evidence for the influence of socioindexical cues on the interpretation of intonational forms. Specifically, it uses a perception study to test whether a particular sentence-final intonation contour in French is interpreted differently depending on which dialect region (Corsica or Continental France) is activated during processing.…”