Presentation: Sarah
Summary: Sarah
This study investigated the effect of speaker age on the perception of vowel shift in New Zealand English (NZE). Given that /æ/ is raised toward /ɛ/ in the speech of young speakers in New Zealand, it was hypothesized that listeners’ vowel perception would be biased toward /æ/-words with the presence of photo of a young speaker. A vowel categorization experiment was conducted. Vowel continua from /æ/ to /ɛ/ were created and embedded. A photo of either old or young male/female speaker was always presented along with auditory stimuli. Results showed that overall participants’ categorization was biased toward /æ/-words if they saw the photo of a young speaker. Nonetheless, this effect interacted with participants’ age, in which the age-dependent trend was only found in older participants, but not younger participants. Such asymmetry was accounted for in the context of exemplar theory, and it was suggested that older speakers, who have experienced the progression of the vowel shift, might have a more salient encoding of this sociophonetic variation in their mental representations.
