Presentation: Sarah
Summary: Sheng-Fu
When entering a non-native
speech community, speakers with regional accents may adjust their
pronunciations to fit in, or they may retain their regional accents to show
their identity. Past studies on the relationship between production and
perception as speakers adjust or retain their pronunciation have shown mixed
evidence. For the present study, a longitudinal research was done on a group of
northern youngsters who left their home for attending university. The assumption
is that these youngsters went from an environment with Northern British English
accent to areas where Standard Southern British English (SSBE) is generally
spoken. The experimental tasks included examination of their production,
perceptual vowel space, and sentence comprehension in noise. The production
experiments showed that after the subjects attended university, their /ʊ/
sound became more centralized like SSBE speakers. As for the perception
experiments in which the speakers selected the best exemplar vowels, results
showed that the subjects with more SSBE-like vowels in their production chose
more SSBE-like vowels as best exemplars, although in general, speakers’
selection of best exemplars did not change over time. Finally, in the sentence
comprehension task, subjects with more SSBE-like vowels performed better in identifying
SSBE speech in noise, yet, in general, subjects’ ability to recognize SSBE
speech did not change over time. Overall, the study showed that individual
differences in production are accompanied by differences in perceptual
representations that may affect speech processing, although the evidence on the
change of perception over time was not found.
