Home Divergence in speech perception
Article
Licensed
Unlicensed Requires Authentication

Divergence in speech perception

  • Abby Walker EMAIL logo , Jennifer Hay , Katie Drager and Kauyumari Sanchez
Published/Copyright: December 14, 2017
Linguistics
From the journal Linguistics Volume 56 Issue 1

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.

Keywords: perception; adaptation; attitudes; divergence

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge the valuable feedback from the reviewers and the time of our participants. This project was funded in part by a Rutherford Discovery Fellowship awarded to the second author.

References

Babel, Molly. 2010. Dialect convergence and divergence in New Zealand English. Language in Society 39. 437–456.10.1017/S0047404510000400Search in Google Scholar

Babel, Molly. 2012. Evidence for phonetic and social selectivity in spontaneous phonetic imitation. Journal of Phonetics 40. 177–189.10.1016/j.wocn.2011.09.001Search in Google Scholar

Babel, Molly & Jamie Russell. 2015. Expectations and speech intelligibility. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 137(5). 2823–2833.10.1121/1.4919317Search in Google Scholar

Baumeister, Roy F., Ellen Bratslavsky, Catrin Finkenauer & Kathleen D. Vohs. 2001. Bad is stronger than good. Review of General Psychology 5. 323–370.10.1037/e413792005-154Search in Google Scholar

Bayard, Donn. 2000. New Zealand English: Origins, relationships, and prospects. Moderna Språk 94(1). 8–14.10.58221/mosp.v94i1.9625Search in Google Scholar

Bell, Allan. 1984. Language style as audience design. Language in Society 13. 145–204.10.1017/S004740450001037XSearch in Google Scholar

Bourhis, Richard Y. & Howard Giles. 1977. The language of intergroup distinctiveness. In Howard Giles (ed.), Language, ethnicity and intergroup relations, 119–135. London: Academic Press.Search in Google Scholar

Bourhis, Richard Y., Howard Giles, Jacques-Phillipe Leyens & Henri Tajfel. 1979. Psycholinguistic distinctiveness: Language divergence in Belgium. In Howard Giles & Robert N. St Clair (eds.), Language and social psychology, 158–185. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Search in Google Scholar

Cox, Felicity & Sallyanne Palethorpe. 2008. Reversal of short front vowel raising in Australian English. Interspeech 1. 342–345.10.21437/Interspeech.2008-144Search in Google Scholar

Delvaux, Veronique & Alain Soquet. 2007. The influence of ambient speech on adult speech productions through unintentional imitation. Phonetica 64. 145–173.10.1159/000107914Search in Google Scholar

Dijksterhuis, Ap & Henk Aarts. 2003. On wildebeests and humans. The preferential detection of negative stimuli. Psychological Science 14. 14–18.10.1111/1467-9280.t01-1-01412Search in Google Scholar

Drager, Katie. 2011. Speaker age and vowel perception. Language and Speech 54(1). 99–121.10.1177/0023830910388017Search in Google Scholar

Drager, Katie, Jennifer Hay & Abby Walker. 2010. Pronounced rivalries: Attitudes and speech production. Te Reo 53. 27–53.Search in Google Scholar

Giles, Howard. 1973. Accent mobility: A model and some data. Anthropological Linguistics 15. 87–105.Search in Google Scholar

Giles, Howard & Peter F. Powesland. 1975. Speech style and social evaluation. London: Academic Press.Search in Google Scholar

Giles, Howard, Donald M. Taylor & Richard Y. Bourhis. 1973. Towards a theory of inter- personal accommodation through language: Some Canadian data. Language in Society 2. 177–192.10.1017/S0047404500000701Search in Google Scholar

Goldinger, Stephen D. 1998. Echoes of echoes? An episodic theory of lexical access. Psychological Review 105. 251–279.10.1037/0033-295X.105.2.251Search in Google Scholar

Hay, Jennifer & Katie Drager. 2010. Stuffed toys and speech perception. Linguistics 48(4). 865–892.10.1515/ling.2010.027Search in Google Scholar

Hay, Jennifer, Margaret Maclagan & Elizabeth Gordon. 2008. New Zealand English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.10.3366/edinburgh/9780748625291.001.0001Search in Google Scholar

Hay, Jennifer, Aaron Nolan & Katie Drager. 2006a. From fush to feesh: Exemplar priming in speech perception. The Linguistic Review 23. 351–379.10.1515/TLR.2006.014Search in Google Scholar

Hay, Jennifer, Paul Warren & Katie Drager. 2006b. Factors influencing speech perception in the context of a merger-in-progress. Journal of Phonetics 34(4). 458–484.10.1016/j.wocn.2005.10.001Search in Google Scholar

Hay, Jennifer, Paul Warren & Katie Drager. 2010. Short-term exposure to one dialect affects processing of another. Language and Speech 53(4). 447–471.10.1177/0023830910372489Search in Google Scholar

Johnson, Keith, Elizabeth Strand & Mariapaola D’Imperio. 1999. Auditory visual integration of talker gender in vowel perception. Journal of Phonetics 27. 359–384.10.1006/jpho.1999.0100Search in Google Scholar

Kang, Okim & Donald Rubin. 2009. Reverse linguistic stereotyping: Measuring the effect of listener expectations on speech evaluation. Journal of Language & Social Psychology 28. 441–456.10.1177/0261927X09341950Search in Google Scholar

Koops, Christian, Elizabeth Gentry & Andrew Pantos. 2008. The effect of perceived speaker age on the perception of PIN and PEN vowels in Houston, Texas. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 34(2). 93–101.Search in Google Scholar

McGowan, Kevin. 2015. Social expectation improves speech perception in noise. Language and Speech 58. 502–521.10.1177/0023830914565191Search in Google Scholar

McMurray, Bob. in prep. Klattworks: A [somewhat] new systematic approach to formant-based speech synthesis for empirical research. Manuscript in preparation.Search in Google Scholar

Natale, Michael. 1975. Convergence of mean vocal intensity in dyadic communication as a function of social desirability. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 32. 790–804.10.1037/0022-3514.32.5.790Search in Google Scholar

Niedzielski, Nancy. 1999. The effect of social information on the perception of sociolinguistic variables. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 18. 62–85.10.1177/0261927X99018001005Search in Google Scholar

Palma de Figueiredo, Roja. 2015. Pop-out effect of negative words in a word-grid-task. Journal of European Psychology Students 6(1). 53–61.10.5334/jeps.cxSearch in Google Scholar

Pardo, Jennifer S. 2006. On phonetic convergence during conversational interaction. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 119. 2382–2393.10.1121/1.2178720Search in Google Scholar

Peeters, Guido & Janusz Czapinski. 1990. Positive-negative asymmetry in evaluations: The distinction between affective and informational negativity effects. European Review of Social Psychology 1. 33–60.10.1080/14792779108401856Search in Google Scholar

Rubin, Donald. 1992. Nonlanguage factors affecting undergraduate’s judgments of nonnative English-speaking teaching assistants. Research in Higher Education 33. 511–531.10.1007/BF00973770Search in Google Scholar

Smith, Adrian. 2004. Black against gold: New Zealand-Australia sporting rivalry in the modern era. In Dilwyn Porter & Adrian Smith (eds.), Sport and national identity in the post-War World, 168–193. London: Routledge.Search in Google Scholar

Staum Casasanto, Laura. 2010. What do listeners know about sociolinguistic variation? Penn Working Papers in Linguistics 15(2). 40–49.Search in Google Scholar

Strand, Elizabeth A. 1999. Uncovering the role of gender stereotypes in speech perception. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 18. 86–99.10.1177/0261927X99018001006Search in Google Scholar

Strand, Elizabeth A. & Keith Johnson. 1996. Gradient and visual speaker normalization in the perception of fricatives. In Dafydd Gibbon (ed.), Natural language processing and speech technology, 14–26. Berlin Mouton de Gruyter.10.1515/9783110821895-003Search in Google Scholar

Sumner, Meghan & Reiko Kataoka. 2013. Effects of indexical variation on spoken word recognition. Journal of Acoustical Society of America Express Letters 134. 485–491.10.1121/1.4826151Search in Google Scholar

Sumner, Meghan, Seung Kyung Kim, Ed King & Kevin McGowan. 2015. The socially weighted encoding of spoken words: A dual-route approach to speech perception. Frontiers in Psychology 4(1015). 1–13.10.3389/fpsyg.2013.01015Search in Google Scholar

Walker, Abby. 2014. Crossing oceans with voices and ears: Second dialect acquisition and topic-based shifting in production and perception. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University dissertation.Search in Google Scholar

Weatherholtz, Kodi, Kathryn Campbell-Kibler & Florian Jaeger. 2014. Socially mediated syntactic alignment. Language Variation and Change 26(3). 387–420.10.1017/S0954394514000155Search in Google Scholar

Wells, John C. 1982. Accents of English I: An introduction. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511611759Search in Google Scholar

Yu, Alan, Carissa Abrego-Collier & Morgan Sonderegger. 2013. Phonetic imitation from an individual-difference perspective: Subjective attitude, personality and “autistic” traits. PLoS ONE 8(9). e74746.10.1371/journal.pone.0074746Search in Google Scholar

A Appendix: Experimental stimuli

Each sentence was presented with the target word final (omitting the material in parentheses), and with the target word medial (including the parenthetic material).

kit sentences

  1. I wanted to go horse riding with my friend but she didn’t have a spare bit

  2. (so I had to stay at home)

  3. I couldn’t be bothered cooking so I went and got fish

  4. (but it took forever since they were so busy)

  5. During the colder months John and I both wanted to stay fit

  6. (so we decided to join a yoga class)

  7. Celine Dion’s new song “love me forever” was a massive hit

  8. (on the Mongolian top of the pops show)

  9. In the end I had to ask my wife where on earth I had left my tool kit (’cause I’m notoriously bad at losing them)

  10. I was going to put the heater on but then I realised that the fire had already been lit

  11. (so I didn’t need to worry after all)

  12. The elephant took a wrong turn and fell into a pit (constructed by nomadic ivory poachers)

  13. My friend and I eventually want to work on a cruise ship (but we need to do some training first)

  14. It was during the test period and so I couldn’t find anywhere to sit (in any of the university libraries)

  15. I charmed her with my good looks, smiling blue eyes and striking wit (all a vain attempt to impress her mother)

trap sentences

  1. This was the first time that Johnny had ever picked up a cricket bat

  2. (and he was so nervous about it he was sure he was going to faint)

  3. At 4 year’s old, there was no way that Warren was old enough to have his own cat

  4. (so his mum promised him one for his tenth birthday instead)

  5. Michael certainly had a tendency to find some very funky hats

  6. (in various op shops, some of which turned out to be worth a lot of money)

  7. We spent all afternoon anxiously looking for Matt (but he was nowhere to be found)

  8. It was going to be uncomfortable wherever we sat (so we just chose to take the next seat that we came across)

dress sentences

  1. Very quickly, I realised that this was actually a horribly uncomfortable bed

    (and that I needed to go back and have it exchanged)

  2. The morning after, I honestly couldn’t remember making the bet

    (so I just paid him just in case it was legitimate)

  3. The government should really do something about student debt (so that young people are actually encouraged to go to university)

    (but he was nowhere to be found)

  4. Some people like to think that Mr Tarantino is sick in the head (but I prefer to believe that he is a talented producer)

  5. For as long as I could recall I had always wanted a pet

  6. (but my mother wouldn’t allow me to have one)

B Appendix: Australian Attitude Index Questionnaire (AAI)

Participants in the NZ1 iteration were asked to read the following sentences and for each one, provide a rating indicating how much they agreed with it. The scale provided was:

1 strongly disagree, 2 disagree, 3 agree, 4 strongly disagree.

These values were placed into the Principal Components Analysis, and the labels used in

Figure 5 are shown in parentheses. For the labels ending in P, the value provided by participants was subtracted from 1, so that higher values aligned with positive attitudes.

  1. Australians and New Zealanders are very similar. (similar)

  2. I find it annoying when people get New Zealanders and Australians confused. (annoyingP)

  3. Australians and New Zealanders agree on the important issue. (agree)

  4. Australia has a good human rights record. (rights)

  5. In most sports, the team I most want New Zealand to beat is Australia. (sportsP)

  6. Most stereotypes about Australians are false. (stereotypes)

  7. I would enjoy living in Australia. (living)

  8. Australia is a place I’d like to go for a holiday. (holiday)

  9. New Zealanders and Australians have very similar accents. (accents)

  10. In most sports, if New Zealand is not playing, then I tend to support Australia. (sports2)

Published Online: 2017-12-14
Published in Print: 2018-1-26

© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  3. Reproducible research in linguistics: A position statement on data citation and attribution in our field
  4. Pathways to adversity and speaker affectedness: On the emergence of unaccusative ‘give’ constructions in Chinese
  5. The internally layered foot in Dutch
  6. Reproachatives and imperatives
  7. On tense and irrealis marking in triclausal constructions (and what distinguishes them from biclausal constructions)
  8. The word status of Chinese adjective-noun combinations
  9. Divergence in speech perception
  10. Notice from the Board of Editors
https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2017-0036
Keywords for this article
perception; adaptation; attitudes; divergence

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  3. Reproducible research in linguistics: A position statement on data citation and attribution in our field
  4. Pathways to adversity and speaker affectedness: On the emergence of unaccusative ‘give’ constructions in Chinese
  5. The internally layered foot in Dutch
  6. Reproachatives and imperatives
  7. On tense and irrealis marking in triclausal constructions (and what distinguishes them from biclausal constructions)
  8. The word status of Chinese adjective-noun combinations
  9. Divergence in speech perception
  10. Notice from the Board of Editors
Sign up now to receive a 20% welcome discount
Institutional Access
How does access work?
Have an idea on how to improve our website?
Please write us.
© 2025 De Gruyter Brill
Downloaded on 18.9.2025 from https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/ling-2017-0036/html
Scroll to top button