Intraspeaker Priming across the New Zealand English Short Front Vowel Shift

2021 ◽  
pp. 002383092110530
Author(s):  
Dan Villarreal ◽  
Lynn Clark

A growing body of research in psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics, and sociolinguistics shows that we have a strong tendency to repeat linguistic material that we have recently produced, seen, or heard. The present paper investigates whether priming effects manifest in continuous phonetic variation the way it has been reported in phonological, morphological, and syntactic variation. We analyzed nearly 60,000 tokens of vowels involved in the New Zealand English short front vowel shift (SFVS), a change in progress in which trap/dress move in the opposite direction to kit, from a topic-controlled corpus of monologues (166 speakers), to test for effects that are characteristic of priming phenomena: repetition, decay, and lexical boost. Our analysis found evidence for all three effects. Tokens that were relatively high and front tended to be followed by tokens that were also high and front; the repetition effect weakened with greater time between the prime and target; and the repetition effect was stronger if the prime and target belonged to (different tokens of) the same word. Contrary to our expectations, however, the cross-vowel effects suggest that the repetition effect responded not to the direction of vowel changes within the SFVS, but rather the peripherality of the tokens. We also found an interaction between priming behavior and gender, with stronger repetition effects among men than women. While these findings both indicate that priming manifests in continuous phonetic variation and provide further evidence that priming is among the factors providing structure to intraspeaker variation, they also challenge unitary accounts of priming phenomena.

2000 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine I. Watson ◽  
Margaret Maclagan ◽  
Jonathan Harrington

This study provides acoustic evidence that in the last 50 years New Zealand English (NZE) has undergone a substantial vowel shift. Two sets of data are studied: the Otago corpus, recorded in 1995, and the Mobile Unit corpus, recorded in 1948. Both corpora have male and female speakers. The corpora were labeled, accented vowels were extracted, and formant values were calculated. The results of the formant analysis from the two corpora are contrasted. We provide evidence that in NZE /i/ has centralized, /e/ and /æ/ have raised, and the diphthongs /i[inverted e]/ and /e[inverted e]/ have merged. We argue that /i/ changed in quality not only because of crowding in the front vowel space, but also because it would be less likely misperceived as an unaccented vowel (i.e., as [inverted e]).


2009 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 437-453 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Langstrof

AbstractThis article investigates the role of vowel duration in the front vowel system of New Zealand English (NZE), drawing on data obtained from speakers born between the 1890s and the 1930s. After providing a brief overview of the history of short vowels in NZE, a comprehensive analysis of front vowel duration in conjunction with a number of earlier results from formant frequency measurements will be presented. It will be shown that the front vowel system of NZE shows interaction between vowel duration and formant frequency. A number of implications that follow from these patterns for the front vowel system of NZE will be discussed. It will be argued that it is reasonable to divide up the class of short front vowels in NZE into a short set (consisting only of one vowel) and a “not-so-short set.” In addition, it will be concluded that phonological class membership is irrelevant to making generalizations over patterns of movements in vowel change.


2011 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-147
Author(s):  
CHRISTIAN LANGSTROF

This article discusses the relation between articulatory features and phonetic properties in the light of a specific type of vowel change, namely a push-chain in the front vowel system of New Zealand English. Specifically, an idea put forward by Hawkins (1976), which claims that the NZE front vowel shift is an example of phonological optimisation in vowel systems, will be discussed in some detail. It will be argued, contra Hawkins, that the NZE front vowel shift is not a good example of phonological optimisation in vowel systems due to the existence of intermediate systems in the speech of individuals showing complex patterns of allophonisation, turning the idea of economy on its head.


Author(s):  
Adreanne Ormond ◽  
Joanna Kidman ◽  
Huia Tomlins-Jahnke

Personhood is complex and characterized by what Avery Gordon describes as an abundant contradictory subjectivity, apportioned by power, race, class, and gender and suspended in temporal and spatial dimensions of the forgotten past, fragmented present, and possible and impossible imagination of the future. Drawing on Gordon’s interpretation, we explore how personhood for young Māori from the nation of Rongomaiwāhine of Aotearoa New Zealand is shaped by a subjectivity informed by a Māori ontological relationality. This discussion is based on research conducted in the Māori community by Māori researchers. They used cultural ontology to engage with the sociohistorical realities of Māori cultural providence and poverty, and colonial oppression and Indigenous resilience. From these complex and multiple realities this essay will explore how young Māori render meaning from their ancestral landscape, community, and the wider world in ways that shape their particular personhood.


BMJ Open ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. e041705
Author(s):  
Ben Wamamili ◽  
Sheleigh Lawler ◽  
Mark Wallace-Bell ◽  
Coral Gartner ◽  
David Sellars ◽  
...  

ObjectivesExamine the patterns of cigarette smoking and e-cigarette use (vaping), the perceived harm of e-cigarettes compared with tobacco cigarettes, and associations between smoking and vaping with student characteristics.DesignCross-sectional studies.SettingThe University of Queensland (UQ), Australia and eight New Zealand (NZ) universities.ParticipantsStudents at UQ: 4957 (70.8% aged <25 years, 63.0% women) and NZ: 1854 (82.5% aged <25 years, 60.1% women).MethodsΧ2 tests compared smoking by age and gender, and vaping by age, gender and smoking status. Two-sided p<0.05 was considered significant and 95% CIs reported where appropriate. Multinomial logistic regression examined associations between smoking and vaping (exclusive smoking, exclusive vaping, dual use and non-use) with age, gender and student type (domestic vs international).ResultsSmoking (UQ vs NZ, 95% CI): ever 45.2% (43.8% to 46.6%) vs 50.0% (47.7% to 52.3%), current 8.9% (8.1% to 9.7%) vs 10.4% (9.1% to 11.9%) and daily 5.2% (4.6% to 5.8%) vs 5.6% (4.6% to 6.7%), and not smoking in indoor 98.3% vs 87.7% or outdoor smoke-free spaces 83.8% vs 65.3%.Vaping (UQ vs NZ, 95% CI): ever 20.9% (19.8% to 22.1%) vs 37.6% (35.4% to 39.9%), current 1.8% (1.5% to 2.2%) vs 6.5% (5.4% to 7.7%) and daily 0.7% (0.5% to 1.0%) vs 2.5% (1.9% to 3.4%), and not vaping in indoor 91.4% vs 79.6% or outdoor smoke-free spaces 84.4% vs 71.3%. Of respondents, 71.7% (70.3% to 73.2%) vs 75.3% (72.9% to 77.6%) perceived e-cigarettes as less harmful than tobacco cigarettes.Men were more likely than women to smoke and vape, and to believe that e-cigarettes are less harmful. Regression models containing all predictors for smoking and vaping were significant and the effect of gender was significant for dual use, exclusive smoking and exclusive vaping (all p<0.01). Men had higher odds for smoking, vaping or dual use.ConclusionsResults suggest significant differences in patterns of smoking and vaping of university students in Australia and NZ, and a strong influence of gender on smoking and vaping.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-50
Author(s):  
Heiko Motschenbacher ◽  
Eka Roivainen

There have been linguistic studies on the gendering mechanisms of adjectives and psychological studies on the relationship between personality traits and gender, but the two fields have never entered into a dialogue on these issues. This article seeks to address this gap by presenting an interdisciplinary study that explores the gendering mechanisms associated with personality traits and personality trait-denoting adjectives. The findings of earlier work in this area and basic gendering mechanisms relevant to adjectives and personality traits are outlined. This is followed by a linguistic and a psychological analysis of the usage patterns of a set of personality trait adjectives. The linguistic section draws on corpus linguistics to explore the distribution of these adjectives with female, male and gender-neutral personal nouns in the Corpus of Contemporary American English. The psychological analysis relates the usage frequencies of personality trait adjectives with the nouns man, woman and person in the Google Books corpus to desirability ratings of the adjectives.


1968 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 232-240 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick M. A. Rabbitt

Repetition-effects (Bertelson, 1965) were examined in three serial self-paced choice-response tasks in which each response was made to all members of a class of more than one signal, and in one task in which eight different responses were each made to one of eight different signals. Three kinds of transition between successive responses occur in such tasks: transitions between Identical responses where the same signal and response are immediately repeated, transitions between Equivalent responses where the same response is made to a new signal and transitions between New responses where neither signal nor response are repeated. The relative reaction-times for these three classes of events were found to vary as a function of stimulus information load, as a function of response information load and as a function of the level of practice which subjects attained in the task in question. These variations allow some comment on the utility of recent models for serial and parallel stimulus analysis as explanatory constructs for the repetition-effect.


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