Abby Walker

Tracking word frequency effects through 130 years of sound change

Contemporary New Zealand English has distinctive pronunciations of three characteristic vowels. Did the evolution of these distinctive pronunciations occur in all words at the same time or were different words affected differently? We analyze the changing pronunciation of New Zealand English in a large set of recordings of speakers born over a 130 year period. We show that low frequency words were at the forefront of these changes and higher frequency words lagged behind. A long-standing debate exists between authors claiming that high frequency words lead regular sound change and others claiming that there are no frequency effects. The leading role of low frequency words is surprising in this context. It can be elucidated in models of lexical processing that include detailed word-specific memories.

Repeat what after whom? Exploring variable selectivity in a cross-dialectal shadowing task

Twenty women from Christchurch, New Zealand and 16 from Columbus Ohio (dialect region U.S. Midland) participated in a bimodal lexical naming task where they repeated monosyllabic words after four speakers from four regional dialects: New Zealand, Australia, U.S. Inland North and U.S. Midland. The resulting utterances were acoustically analyzed, and presented to listeners on Amazon Mechanical Turk in an AXB task. Convergence is observed, but differs depending on the dialect of the speaker, the dialect of the model, the particular word class being shadowed, and the order in which dialects are presented to participants. We argue that these patterns are generally consistent with findings that convergence is promoted by a large phonetic distance between shadower and model (Babel, 2010, contra Kim et al., 2011), and greater existing variability in a vowel class (Babel, 2012). The results also suggest that more comparisons of accommodation toward different dialects are warranted, and that the investigation of the socio-indexical meaning of specific linguistic forms in context is a promising avenue for understanding variable selectivity in convergence.

Football versus football: Effect of topic on /r/ realization in American and English sports fans

Can the topic of a conversation, when heavily associated with a particular dialect region, influence how a speaker realizes a linguistic variable? We interviewed fans of English Premier League soccer at a pub in Columbus, Ohio. Nine speakers of British English and eleven speakers of American English were interviewed about their favorite American football and English soccer teams. We present evidence that the soccer fans in this speech community produce variants more consistent with Standard American English when talking about American football than English soccer. Specifically, speakers were overall more /r/-ful (F3 values were lower in rhotic environments) when talking about their favorite American football team. Numeric trends in the data also suggest that exposure to both American and British English, being a fan of both sports, and task may mediate these effects.

Effects of Lexical Competition and Dialect Exposure on Phonological Priming

A cross-modal lexical decision task was used to explore the effects of lexical competition and dialect exposure on phonological form priming. Relative to unrelated auditory primes, matching real word primes facilitated lexical decision for visual real word targets, whereas competing minimal pair primes inhibited lexical decision. These effects were robust across two English vowel pairs (mid–front and low–front) and for two listener groups (mono-dialectal and multi-dialectal). However, both the most robust facilitation and the most robust inhibition were observed for the mid–front vowel words with few phonological competitors for the mono-dialectal listener group. The mid–front vowel targets were acoustically more distinct than the low–front vowel targets, suggesting that acoustic–phonetic similarity leads to stronger lexical competition and less robust facilitation and inhibition. The multi-dialectal listeners had more prior exposure to multiple different dialects than the mono-dialectal group, suggesting that long-term exposure to linguistic variability contributes to a more flexible processing strategy in which lexical competition extends over a longer period of time, leading to less robust facilitation and inhibition.

Divergence in speech perception

Abstract This paper presents results from an experiment designed to test whether New Zealand listeners’ perceptual adaptation towards Australian English is mediated by their attitudes toward Australia, which we attempted to manipulate experimentally. Participants were put into one of three conditions, where they either read good facts about Australia, bad facts about Australia, or no facts about Australia (the control). Participants performed the same listening task – matching the vowel in a sentence to a vowel in a synthesized continuum – before and after reading the facts. The results indicate that participants who read the bad facts shifted their perception of kit to more Australian-like tokens relative to the control group, while the participants who read good facts shifted their perception of kit to more NZ-like tokens relative to the control group. This result shows that perceptual adaptation towards a dialect can occur in the absence of a speaker of that dialect and that these adaptations are subject to a listener’s (manipulated) affect towards the primed dialect region.