Are Serbian and English listeners insensitive to lexical pitch accents in Serbian?

Dušan Nikolić; Stephen Winters

doi:10.1515/phon-2022-2023

Article

Are Serbian and English listeners insensitive to lexical pitch accents in Serbian?

Dušan Nikolić and Stephen Winters

Published/Copyright: September 8, 2022

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From the journal Phonetica Volume 79 Issue 4

Abstract

The paper investigated possible perceptual insensitivity effects in the perception of lexical pitch accents by native and non-native listeners, that is, by Serbian and English listeners, respectively. The objective of the study was to explore which word-prosodic categories listeners used when they were required to contrast and recall sequences of lexical pitch accents. To that effect, Serbian and English listeners performed a Sequence Recall Task (SRT) in which they contrasted pairs of non-words with different Serbian lexical pitch accent types, and recalled the sequences of these non-words under different memory load conditions. Listeners’ answers were coded correct and incorrect and the accuracy scores between the groups were compared and analyzed. Both groups had almost identical levels of accuracy and they performed well above chance level on each contrast. Neither group exhibited any effects of perceptual insensitivity to lexical pitch accents. English (non-native) listeners did not differ in their performance from native Serbian listeners, which, contrary to what previous research suggested, implied that one’s native language word-prosodic category inventory did not preclude the encoding of non-native word-prosodic categories. Instead, non-native listeners were capable of deploying different prosodic resources such as post-lexical pitch accents to recall the sequences.

Keywords: English; length; lexical pitch accents; pitch; Serbian

Corresponding author: Dušan Nikolić, Division of Linguistics, School of Languages, Literatures, Linguistics & Cultures, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, T2N 1N4, Canada, E-mail: dusan.nikolic1@ucalgary.ca

Correction note: Correction added after online publication September 8, 2022: The manuscript Are Serbian and English listeners “deaf” to lexical pitch accents in Serbian? was recently published in the journal Phonetica. Since the publishing of the paper certain concerns have been raised by the academic community with respect to the use of the terms “deaf” and “deafness” in our paper. After consulting with the Canadian Association of the Deaf, Sign Language Linguistic Society, and some scholars who belong to the Deaf community, it has been decided that certain amendments should be made. The amendments include several changes. The terms “deaf” and “deafness” have been replaced with the following terms: “insensitive”, “insensitivity”, and “perceptual insensitivity”. The new title of the manuscript is “Are Serbian and English listeners insensitive to lexical pitch accents in Serbian?”. In addition, one entire footnote describing the terms has been deleted. These are the only amendments to the initial manuscript. References, tables and figures, as well as the rest of the text, have not been modified. Authors and publisher sincerely apologise for the inconvenience to the readers.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Dr. Mary O’Brien, Dr. Darin Flynn, Dr. Angeliki Athansopoulou, and Dr. John Scott (all from the University of Calgary) for valuable discussion of the study and their suggestions on how to improve some aspects of the study.

Research funding: The authors did not have any funding for this research.
Author contributions: D.N. designed and conducted the experiment in the present study and was primary author of the manuscript. S.W. was involved in overseeing all aspects of the experimental design, the analyses of the results, and the writing of the manuscript.
Conflicts of interest statement: The authors have no conflict of interest to declare.
Ethical approval: The study was approved by the Conjoint Faculties Research Ethics Board (CFREB) and it received the ethics ID: REB20-0210. All participants read and signed an informed consent form before starting the study.

Appendices

Appendix A

8 lists with 8 different combinations of non-words presented to participants

Subjects	1, 9, 17, 25	2, 10, 18, 26	3, 11, 19, 27	4, 12, 20, 28	5, 13, 21, 29	6, 14, 22, 30	7, 15, 23, 31	8, 16, 24, 32
Combinations	Short	Long	Short	Long	Falling	Rising	Falling	Rising
	Long	Short	Long	Short	Rising	Falling	Rising	Falling
	Falling	Falling	Rising	Rising	Short	Short	Long	Long
	Rising	Rising	Falling	Falling	Long	Long	Short	Short

Appendix B

Binomial test results

Sequence	Participants	p-value	confidence intervals
4	Serbian	< .01	0.79 – 0.87
4	English	< .01	0.85 – 0.90
5	Serbian	< .01	0.75 – 0.84
5	English	< .01	0.75 – 0.82
6	Serbian	< .01	0.75 – 0.84
6	Canadian	< .01	0.66 – 0.73

Appendix C

Output of the logistic regression model

*Model: Accuracy∼LanguagePAType**
Coefficients	Estimate	Std. Error	z value	p value	2.5%	97.5%
(Intercept)	1.69	0.13	13.44	0.00	1.45	1.94
LanguageSerbian	0.94	0.27	3.43	0.00	0.43	1.51
PATypemavi	-0.87	0.16	-5.42	0.00	-1.18	-0.55
PATypenive	-0.39	0.17	-2.30	0.02	-0.72	-0.06
PATyperuva	-0.20	0.17	-1.14	0.25	-0.53	0.14
LanguageSerbian:PATypemavi	-1.14	0.32	-3.57	0.00	-1.78	-0.53
LanguageSerbian:PATypenive	-0.90	0.33	-2.7	0.01	-1.56	-0.26
LanguageSerbian:PATyperuva	-0.63	0.35	-1.81	0.07	-1.32	0.04
χ²(7) = 112.62, p = 0.00 Pseudo-R² (Cragg-Uhler) = 0.06 Pseudo-R² (McFadden) = 0.04 AIC = 2965.97, BIC = 3014.05

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Published Online: 2022-09-08

Published in Print: 2022-08-26

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Articles in the same Issue

https://doi.org/10.1515/phon-2022-2023

Keywords for this article

English; length; lexical pitch accents; pitch; Serbian