Doctoral Dissertation Research: Individual-level Knowledge of an Incoming Phonemic Contrast

University Of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA

Investigators

Abstract

The goal of this dissertation research is to contribute to our understanding of how speakers deal with sound change in progress. It will combine socio- and psycholinguistic approaches in order to compare individuals' production and perception of a sound that is new in the language variety that they speak. One of the major ways that languages change through time is by the loss and gain of sound categories (phonemes). A sound is a phoneme category in a language if changing the sound changes meaning. For example, TH is a phoneme in English, and changing TH to S changes the word THINK to SINK. A speaker whose language does not have a particular sound will perform worse on tasks that ask him to recognize or use that sound than a speaker whose language does have it. Individuals learning a new language typically struggle to produce unfamiliar sounds, or to tell two sounds apart. But what about a speaker who is in the middle of this kind of language change? How will this speaker perform with the new sound, and what can we say about the number of phonemes in their sound system? By zooming in on a sound change happening right now in the city of Seville, Spain, this project will challenge assumptions about what it means to have a sound category. It will add to knowledge about phoneme mergers, joining a new line of research expanding beyond Germanic vowels. In conducting the project, the researcher will train a local student in linguistic research skills. Finally, the focus of this study on a low-prestige variety of continental Spanish will support the idea that socio- and psycholinguistic studies of nonstandard varieties can contribute to our scientific understanding of human language. S and TH are different sound categories in most of Spain. The standard ("correct") way to speak Spanish in Spain uses both sounds as English does, so that replacing S with TH can change e.g., casa 'house' to caza 'hunt'. The research will be conducted in the city of Seville, where speakers are now beginning to use both S and TH, rather than just S (a pattern known as "seseo"). Some speakers go back and forth between using only S and using both sounds. This project examines these speakers' language systems by looking both at how they normally speak (how much they use TH, and when), and how well they perform on tasks with this sound. Sociolinguistic interviews will be conducted with a sample of young adult speakers. The behavior observed will be compared to data collected in a battery of psycholinguistic experiments. From these the researcher will evaluate the speakers' low and high-level perception of the sounds S and TH, and mental representations of standard and nonstandard forms containing these sounds. The results of the sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic studies will be combined to form a holistic picture of the individual phonological systems resulting from contact between merged and unmerged varieties.