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

本论文研究的目的是帮助我们理解说话者是如何处理声音变化的。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中新声音的产生和感知。语言随时间变化的主要方式之一是声音类别（音素）的丧失和获得。声音是一种语言中的音素范畴，如果改变声音就会改变意义。例如，TH是英语中的一个音素，把TH变成S就把THINK变成了SINK。一个语言中没有特定发音的说话者在要求他识别或使用特定发音的任务中会比一个语言中有特定发音的说话者表现得更差。学习一门新语言的人通常很难发出不熟悉的声音，或者区分两个声音。但是处于这种语言变化过程中的说话者呢？这个说话者用新的声音表现如何，我们能说他们的声音系统中有多少个音素？通过放大正在西班牙塞维利亚市发生的声音变化，这个项目将挑战关于声音类别意味着什么的假设。它将增加对音素合并的了解，加入日耳曼元音以外的新研究领域。在进行该项目的过程中，研究人员将训练一名当地学生的语言研究技能。最后，本研究的重点是低声望的大陆西班牙语变体，这将支持非标准变体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的观点。在西班牙大部分地区，S和TH是不同的发音类别。在西班牙，说西班牙语的标准（“正确”）方式是像英语一样使用这两个音，所以用TH代替S可以改变，例如，casa ‘house’变成caza ‘hunt’。这项研究将在塞维利亚市进行，那里的人现在开始同时使用S和TH，而不仅仅是S（一种被称为“seseo”的模式）。有些说话者在只使用S音和同时使用S音之间摇摆不定。这个项目通过观察这些人平时说话的方式（他们使用TH音的频率和时间），以及他们在完成任务时使用TH音的表现，来研究这些人的语言系统。社会语言学访谈将以年轻的成年演讲者为样本进行。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。从这些数据中，研究者将评估说话者对S音和TH音的高低感知，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结合起来，形成一个整体的图像，单个语音系统产生的接触之间的合并和未合并的变体。

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.