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

博士论文研究：传入音素对比的个人水平知识

• 批准号: 1627973
• 负责人: Meredith Tamminga
• 金额: $ 0.59万
• 依托单位: University of Pennsylvania
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2016
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2016-09-01 至 2018-06-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1627973&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Individual; level

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.

本论文研究的目的是帮助我们理解说话人如何处理语音过程中的变化。它将结合社会语言学和心理语言学的方法，以比较个人对他们所说的语言多样性中新的声音的产生和感知。语言随时间变化的主要方式之一是语音类别(音素)的丧失和获得。如果声音改变了意义，那么声音就是一种语言中的音素类别。例如，th是英语中的一个音素，将th改为S会将单词Think更改为Sink。语言没有特定声音的说话者在要求他识别或使用该声音的任务中的表现会比有这种声音的说话者差。学习一门新语言的人通常很难发出不熟悉的声音，或者区分两种声音。但是，如果一位演讲者正在经历这种语言变化，那该怎么办呢？这位演讲者将如何使用新的声音，我们可以对他们的音响系统中的音素数量说些什么？通过放大西班牙塞维利亚市正在发生的声音变化，这个项目将挑战关于拥有声音类别意味着什么的假设。它将增加有关音素合并的知识，加入到日耳曼元音以外的新研究领域。在实施该项目时，研究人员将培训一名当地学生的语言研究技能。最后，这项研究的重点是低声望的西班牙大陆语种，这将支持这样的观点，即对非标准语种的社会和心理语言学研究有助于我们对人类语言的科学理解。在西班牙大部分地区，S和TH是不同的声音类别。西班牙人说西班牙语的标准(“正确”)方式是像英语一样同时使用这两个音，因此用th代替S可以把Casa‘house’改为caza‘Hunt’。这项研究将在塞维利亚市进行，在那里，说话者现在开始同时使用S和TH，而不仅仅是S(一种被称为Seseo的模式)。一些演讲者在只使用S和同时使用两种声音之间来回切换。这个项目通过观察这些说话者通常如何说话(他们使用TH的次数和时间)，以及他们在使用这种声音完成任务时的表现来检查这些说话者的语言系统。社会语言学访谈将以年轻的成年说话者为样本进行。观察到的行为将与一系列心理语言学实验中收集的数据进行比较。由此，研究人员将评估说话者对S和TH声音的低级和高级知觉，以及包含这些声音的标准和非标准形式的心理表征。社会语言学和心理语言学的研究结果将被结合起来，以形成合并和未合并变种之间接触所产生的个体语音系统的整体图景。