This article has three main aims. First, I review what is known about encoding social-indexical information in phonetics/phonology, suggesting that it is more complex and more extensive than typically acknowledged in laboratory phonology. Secondly, I explore evidence for the development of indexical knowledge in phonological acquisition, considering indexical learning from the perspective of exemplar theory. One of the attractions of exemplar theory is its capacity to predict learning of both linguistic and social structures through the same mechanism. The tenets of exemplar theory also make a number of predictions about indexical learning: some types of indexical properties are likely to be transmitted more readily than others, as a function of the frequency and phonetic transparency with which they are manifested. The predictions appear to be borne out relatively well by the available data. I end by raising a number of implications and challenges, in particular, but not exclusively, for exemplar theory.

Publicly Available May 27, 2010

A sociophonetic analysis of perception of sexual orientation in Puerto Rican Spanish

Sara Mack

Page range: 41-63

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Abstract

Listeners display acute sensitivity to phonetic variation that marks social identity; this sensitivity is observable in listener perceptions of a variety of social identities, including social class, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation. Most previous research on phonetic variation and sexual orientation has focused on English, with little data available from other languages. The current study addresses this gap by exploring associations between phonetic variation and perception of social categories in Spanish, with a focus on perception of sexual orientation. The study examined listener perceptions of speaker sexual orientation, height, age, and social class to determine to what extent Spanish-speaking listeners make uniform evaluations of sexual orientation based on speech, and, if so, what acoustic parameters correlate with those evaluations. The study also analyzed the relationships between perceptions of speaker sexual orientation and speaker height, age, and social class. Clusters of listeners determined a posteriori using factor analysis were found to share patterns of evaluations, and F2 frequencies of two mid front vowel (/e/) tokens were signifi cant correlates of evaluations of sexual orientation. Listener evaluations of perceived sexual orientation were correlated with evaluations of perceived height, highlighting the complexity of indexicality as well as the multi-faceted nature of social identity.

Publicly Available May 27, 2010

Lexical neighborhoods and phonological confusability in cross-dialect word recognition in noise

Cynthia G. Clopper, Janet B. Pierrehumbert, Terrin N. Tamati

Page range: 65-92

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Abstract

Lexical neighborhood density is a well-known factor affecting phonological categorization in spoken word recognition. The current study examined the interaction between lexical neighborhood density and dialect variation in spoken word recognition in noise. The stimulus materials were real English words produced in two regional American English dialects. To manipulate lexical neighborhood density, target words were selected so that predicted phonological confusions across dialects resulted in real English words in the word-competitor condition and did not result in real English words in the nonword-competitor condition. Word and vowel recognition performance were more accurate in the nonword-competitor condition than the word-competitor condition for both talker dialects. An examination of the responses to specific vowels revealed the role of dialect variation in eliciting this effect. When the predicted phonological confusions were real lexical neighbors, listeners could respond with either the target word or the confusable minimal pair, and were more likely than expected to produce a minimal pair differing from the target by one vowel. When the predicted phonological confusions were not real words, however, the listeners exhibited less lexical competition and responded with the target word or a minimal pair differing by one consonant.

Publicly Available May 27, 2010

Sensitivity to grammatical and sociophonetic variability in perception

Katie K. Drager

Page range: 93-120

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Abstract

Phonetic realizations vary depending on social characteristics of the speaker, and recent research provides evidence that individuals are sensitive to at least some of these sociophonetic relationships during perception (Strand and Johnson, Gradient and visual speaker normalization in the perception of fricatives, Mouton, 1996; Hay et al., Journal of Phonetics 34: 458–484, 2006). In addition to socially-conditioned variation, there is evidence that phonetic realizations in production vary depending on the grammatical function of a word (Plug, Phonetic reduction and categorisation in exemplar-based representation:Observations on a Dutch discourse marker, 2005; Hay and Bresnan, The Linguistic Review 23: 321–349, 2006), yet it is not known whether listeners can actively exploit this phonetic variation in speech perception. This paper reports on three perception experiments conducted to determine whether perceivers' sensitivity to fine phonetic detail can assist in extraction of both grammatical and social meaning from the signal.

Publicly Available May 27, 2010

Bringing semantics to sociophonetics: Social variables and secondary entailments

E. Allyn Smith, Kathleen Currie Hall, Benjamin Munson

Page range: 121-155

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Abstract

This paper introduces a novel approach to the question of how sociophonetic information might be stored cognitively that makes use of the tools of formal semantics. This approach involves applying conventional semantic tests for types of lexicalized meanings (e.g. presuppositions, conventional implicatures) to sociophonetic variables, with the hypothesis that, insofar as sociophonetic meaning patterns like lexical meaning, it should be stored in the same way. Two examples of how this approach can be implemented experimentally are given, applying projections tests (Frege, Letter to Peano, University of Chicago, 1896) (i.e., the ‘Family of Sentences’ tests, Chierchia & McConnell-Ginet 1990) and the ‘Hey, Wait a Minute!’ test (Shannon, Foundations of language 14: 247–249, 1976, von Fintel, Would you believe it? The king of France is back! Presuppositions and truth-value intuitions, Oxford University Press, 2004) to patterns of /æ / tensing and retraction in Minnesotan English and /aI / monophthongization in Southern English, respectively. Preliminary results of these experiments indicate that sociophonetic meaning patterns like secondary entailments (such as presuppositions and conventional implicatures) from the semantics literature, being both conventional and subsidiary to the proffered content of an utterance, and thus should be considered lexical. The primary goal of the paper, however, is to present a new way of thinking rather than to provide conclusive laboratory evidence for a specific position.

Publicly Available May 27, 2010

Levels of Phonological Abstraction and Knowledge of Socially Motivated Speech-Sound Variation: A Review, a Proposal, and a Commentary on the Papers by Clopper, Pierrehumbert, and Tamati, Drager, Foulkes, Mack, and Smith, Hall, and Munson

Benjamin Munson

Page range: 157-177

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Publicly Available May 27, 2010

Accessing psycho-acoustic perception and language-specific perception with speech sounds

Molly Babel, Keith Johnson

Page range: 179-205

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Abstract

In this paper we review the results of four speech perception experiments that explore the difference between language-specific perception and psycho-acoustic auditory perception. The first two experiments examine this difference with voiceless fricatives by American English and Dutch listeners. The second series of experiments explores the perception of consonant palatalization by American English and Russian listeners. These experiments examine this processing difference through two tasks: speeded AX discrimination (“same” or “different” response) and similarity rating. The fast-paced nature of the AX discrimination task is designed to bypass linguistic processing and hone in on pure auditory similarity. The similarity rating task asks listeners to compare two stimuli at a more leisurely pace and language-specific perception is evaluated. The results of these experiments suggest that psycho-acoustic perception can be evaluated apart from linguistic perception. Other work using this experimental paradigm, however, has found language effects in both AX discrimination and rating tasks (Boomershine et al., The impact of allophony vs. contrast on speech perception, Mouton de Gruyter, 2008; McGuire, Phonetic category learning, The Ohio State University, 2007). We reconcile our findings with the contrary results by demonstrating that language effects tend to appear in the longer response latencies that naturally allow for linguistic processing and are attenuated in the fast responses.

Publicly Available May 27, 2010

Listeners use vowel harmony and word-final stress to spot nonsense words: A study of Turkish and French

Barış Kabak, Kazumi Maniwa, Nina Kazanina

Page range: 207-224

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Abstract

The study explores the role of stress and vowel harmony as cues for speech segmentation. Both in French and in Turkish stress is demarcative, typically falling on word-final syllables. Additionally, Turkish (but not French) has a regular front-back vowel harmony which dictates that all vowels within a word must be either front or back. French and Turkish participants performed a target detection task in which they had to spot nonsense words embedded in a longer auditory string. The results show that word-final stress can successfully signal an upcoming word boundary and is used for speech segmentation by speakers of both languages. In the Turkish group but not in the French group we also found a facilitatory effect of vowel disharmony. We conclude that both vowel harmony and stress can independently signal word boundaries and suggest that listeners can exploit these phonological regularities during speech segmentation.

About this journal

De Gruyter Mouton published Laboratory Phonology from 2010 to 2015. Back issues are available on the journal home page.

Laboratory phonology represents the scientific study of the elements of spoken and signed language, their organization, their grammatical function, and their role in speech communication. Research in laboratory phonology uses laboratory or experimental methods and is grounded in quantitative analyses of empirical data from diverse languages. The laboratory phonology approach also extends naturally to the parallel investigation of manual signs as the encoding elements of signed languages. Laboratory phonology is at the leading edge of the general shift towards experimental and quantitative approaches to the study of language across the discipline of linguistics.

The Laboratory Phonology journal publishes research on phonology from a range of disciplinary perspectives including linguistics, psychology, speech & hearing science, communication science, computer science, electrical & computer engineering, and other related fields. The journal encourages submissions on any of the above areas for publication in regular issues and also publishes special issues of select papers from Laboratory Phonology conferences.