Department of Speech and Hearing Science, The Ohio State University, 1070 Carmack Road, Columbus, Ohio 43210, USA.
J Acoust Soc Am. 2020 Jan;147(1):627. doi: 10.1121/10.0000542.
This study assessed the ability of Southern listeners to accommodate extensive talker variability in identifying vowels in their local Appalachian community in the context of sound change. Building on prior work, the current experiment targeted a subset of spectrally overlapping vowels in local and two non-local varieties to establish whether adult and child listeners will demonstrate the local dialect advantage. Listeners responded to isolated target words, which minimized the interaction of multiple linguistic and dialect-specific features. For most vowel categories, the local dialect advantage was not demonstrated. However, adult listeners showed sensitivity to generational changes, indicating their familiarity with the local norms. A differential response pattern in children suggests that children perceived the vowels through the lens of their own experience with vowel production, representing a sound change in the community. Compared with the adults, children also relied more on stress cues, with increased confusions when the vowels were unstressed. The study provides evidence that identification accuracy is dependent upon the robustness of cues in individual vowel categories-whether local or non-local-and suggests that the bottom-up processes underlying phonetic vowel categorization in isolated monosyllables can interact with the top-down processing of dialect- and talker-specific information.
本研究评估了南方听众在语音变化背景下识别其当地阿巴拉契亚社区中元音的能力，以适应广泛的说话者变异性。在先前工作的基础上，当前实验针对当地和两种非本地变体中频谱重叠的元音子集，以确定成人和儿童听众是否会表现出当地方言优势。听众对孤立的目标词做出反应，最大限度地减少了多个语言和方言特定特征的相互作用。对于大多数元音类别，并未表现出当地方言优势。然而，成年听众对代际变化表现出敏感性，表明他们熟悉当地规范。儿童的不同反应模式表明，儿童通过自己的元音产生经验来感知元音，代表社区中的语音变化。与成人相比，儿童也更多地依赖重音线索，在元音非重读时会增加混淆。该研究提供了证据表明，识别准确性取决于个体元音类别的线索稳健性——无论是本地还是非本地，并表明孤立单音节中语音元音分类的自下而上的过程可以与方言和说话者特定信息的自上而下的处理相互作用。
