SocioPhonAus4
Following the successful 3rd Workshop on Sociophonetic Variability in the English Varieties of Australia (SocioPhonAus3) in Brisbane in July 2022 and at SST2022, a satellite SocioPhonAus4 event will be held as part of SST2024 with a dedicated oral session and a keynote speaker.
The SocioPhonAus4 keynote speaker is:
A/Prof Lynn Clark, University of Canterbury
Talk Title/Abstract: “Understanding co-variation in speech production and perception”
The root of the work I’ll talk about is the finding that was published in Brand, Hay, Clark, Watson, & Sóskuthy (2021) – in NZE at least, speakers can be identified as leaders or laggers in multiple ongoing sound changes. After summarising this work, I’ll spend most of the talk exploring this further. First, I’ll present work that explores how stable a speaker’s patterns of covariation are over real time and whether these leaders and laggers of sound changes remain leaders and laggers. I’ll show that over real time, there is significant stability across two unique vowel clusters, suggesting that speakers’ covariation position within their community remains stable over time, regardless of speakers’ changes in the realisation of specific vowel variables. In the second part of the talk, I’ll explore whether the patterns of co-varying vowels identified in speech production also surface as perceptually salient to NZ listeners. I’ll present results from a free-classification task showing that there are perceptual dimensions (established using multidimensional scaling analysis) that are predicted by the covarying subsystems of vowels identified by Brand et al. (2021) in speech production. This suggests that covarying vowel patterns can carry social meaning. In the final study, I’ll present results from a pairwise comparison experiment that continues to explore the social meaning of vowel clusters and the interaction between vowel clusters, pitch, articulation rate and creak.
