Browse by author
Lookup NU author(s): Professor Gerry Docherty, Dr Christian Langstrof
Full text for this publication is not currently held within this repository. Alternative links are provided below where available.
This paper reports the results of an experimental study designed to investigate how listeners learn to create new associations between phonetic properties of the speech signal and external social referents. Very little is known of how this learning takes place in children, and it is a particularly challenging area to study given the difficulty in controlling some of the variables which are likely to be important factors in children's learning of the productive and interpretative dimensions of social-indexical phonetic variation. Thus, in this study, we focus on adult listeners in order to develop a sense of how adults might approach this learning task, and also to test out a method for probing this form of learning in a controlled fashion. 49 participants were trained on new patterns of social-indexical variability and, in a subsequent test phase, we assessed the extent to which this training led the listeners to acquire new associations between specific realizational variants and the social categories with which they have been associated in the training material. Results are reported from four experimental conditions which provided listeners with a range of different learning tasks. Our findings suggest that learning of novel sociophonetic associations can be achieved as the result of a relatively short amount of exposure to training material incorporating the new association, but that the success with which learning takes place is dependent on a number of factors such as the nature of the criterial variable and individual learner variation.
Author(s): Docherty GJ, Langstrof C, Foulkes P
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Linguistics
Year: 2013
Volume: 51
Issue: 2
Pages: 355-380
Print publication date: 15/03/2013
ISSN (print): 0024-3949
ISSN (electronic): 1613-396X
Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/ling-2013-0014
DOI: 10.1515/ling-2013-0014
Altmetrics provided by Altmetric
