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Socially Stratified Phonetic Variation and Perceived Identity in Puerto Rican Spanish

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Socially Stratified Phonetic Variation and Perceived Identity in Puerto Rican Spanish Socially stratified phonetic variation and perceived identity in Puerto Rican Spanish A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Sara Lynn Mack IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Timothy Face and Benjamin Munson, Advisers August 2009 © Sara L. Mack, August 2009 Acknowledgments I am very grateful to the University of Minnesota Office of International Programs, which funded this dissertation through a Doctoral Fellowship for International Research and Writing. I am also grateful to the University of Minnesota Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies for additional monetary support. I owe a debt of gratitude to my teachers at the Norwalk and Brookwood schools, especially Lillian Rumpe, Lester Mull, Robert Bradley, Robert Keller, Janet Amenda Brueggeman, and the late Deborah Dannhoff and Donna Arendt. I benefited greatly from classes with my teachers at the University of Wisconsin, especially Natalia Francis, John Nitti, Deborah Brandt, and Tim Allen. I am grateful to my advisers at the University of Minnesota, Tim Face and Benjamin Munson, for their support and guidance, as well as committee members Carol Klee and Francisco Ocampo, for their helpful feedback and encouragement. I am especially grateful to Luis Ortiz López; I couldn’t have done the study without his generous help. Thanks also to Patrick-André Mather, Keyla Morales Muñoz, José Alberto Santiago Espinoza, Calib Sael, Héctor Aponte Alequín, Gladys, Alma Simounet, and many others who helped in the data collection process at the Universidad de Puerto Rico – Río Piedras. I would also like to thank Jen Hay, Katie Drager, and attendees of LabPhon XI for comments and feedback on parts of the study. I am very lucky to have friends and family who were patient and supportive during the dissertation process. I would especially like to thank Vanesa Arozamena, Elizabeth Dussol, and my sisters, brothers, nieces, and nephews. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my parents, who passed on a great love of learning as well as limitless i curiosity about the world to me. Finally, I thank Stephen Kellert, who supported me unconditionally, helped with every aspect of the dissertation, and encouraged me to follow my dreams. ii Abstract This dissertation examines the interaction between phonetic variation and perceptions of speaker identity in Puerto Rican Spanish. Using an interdisciplinary approach, three experiments were designed and carried out: (1) an descriptive study of stereotypes about sexual orientation and male speech, (2) an observational study examining the relationship between acoustic parameters and perceived sexual orientation, perceived height, perceived social class, and perceived age, and (3) an implicit- processing experiment examining the influence of social stereotypes on memory for voices. The study was carried out in the San Juan, Puerto Rico, metropolitan area and included ninety-six participants. Results of the first experiment indicate that there is considerable uniformity in notions of speech variation associated with the gay male speech stereotype for the participants in the study, and that the most cited stereotypical markers of sexual orientation are related to stereotypical notions of gender. However, a majority of the respondents explicitly stated that although they realize a stereotype exists, they do not believe there is necessarily a correspondence between stereotypes of gay men’s speech and real life production. Results of the second experiment show that listeners do evaluate speakers’ voices differently in terms of perceived sexual orientation, and that perceptions of sexual orientation are most strongly predicted by one acoustic measure of vowel quality (the second resonant frequency of the vowel /e/, which relates to tongue position in the anterior-posterior dimension). An examination of the relationship between perceptions of sexual orientation and perceptions of height, age, and social class revealed that perceptions of height were correlated with perceived sexual iii orientation. The third experiment showed that listeners responded more quickly to speakers previously rated as more gay sounding than they did to speakers rated as more straight sounding, and the slowest mean responses were for the deleted variant. Most significantly, a d-prime analysis showed the strongest signal detection in the case of the sibilant ([s]) when produced by stereotypically gayer sounding speakers. The results suggest a relationship between /s/ variation and listener perceptions of sexual orientation as well as a possible effect of perceived sexual orientation on speech processing. Taken together, these results underscore the need for methods that measure both conscious and subconscious effects of stereotypes in speech production and perception. iv Table of contents Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………….......i Abstract…………………………………………………………………………..…….iii Table of Contents…………………………………………………………………........v List of Tables…………………………………………………………………..............vi List of Figures………………………………………………………………….............vii Chapter 1, Introduction…………………………………………………………..…….1 Chapter 2, Review of the Literature………………………………………..…………..9 Chapter 3, Experiment One: Interviews on speech stereotypes and social categories....48 Chapter 4, Experiment Two: Explicit measures of perceived social identity ………….66 Chapter 5, Experiment Three: Implicit measures voice recognition task………………83 Chapter 6, Conclusions and recommendations for further research……………………117 References………………………………………………………………………………125 Appendices……………………………………………………………………………...134 v List of Tables Table 2.1. Summary of /s/ variation in San Juan, Puerto Rico (López Morales, 1983)...52 Table 4.1. Correlation analysis of perceived sexual orientation, perceived height, perceived age, and perceived social class……………………………………………….68 Table 4.2. Stepwise regression results for acoustic measures of vowels, all factors…...73 Table 4.3. Correlations (Spearman ρ) between individual listeners’ perceived sexual orientation ratings and average acoustic characteristics of the stimuli, separated by the clusters derived from a factor analysis…………………………………………………..75 Table 5.1. Response type coding system……………………………………………….97 Table 5.2. Values of d’ by /s/ type and perceived sexual orientation…………………..98 vi List of Figures Figure 4.1. Group averages of vowel formant frequency by word………………………71 Figure 5.1. Sequence of an experimental trial. …………………………………………82 Figure 5.2. Model of combinations of perceived sexual orientation and /s/ type...........101 Figure 5.3. Mean response times by perceived sexual orientation and /s/ type………..103 Figure 5.4. Mean response times by PSO and /s/ type, Condition One.……..……...…106 Figure 5.5. Mean response times by PSO and /s/ type, Condition Two……………….108 vii Chapter 1 Introduction 1.1 Statement of the dissertation problem This dissertation addresses how variation in pronunciation interacts with evaluations, or perceptions, of a speaker’s social identity1. It is organized around the concept of socioindexicality, or the idea that certain patterns index (in the sense of the Latin root indicare, ‘to point out, indicate’) social information. The dissertation approaches socioindexicality from the perspective of sociophonetics. Sociophonetics, in general terms, “describes work at the intersection of sociolinguistics and phonetics” (Foulkes, 2006, p. 1), and as such holds that both social and phonetic data are necessary to fully account for phonetic and phonological patterns observable in human speech. Use of the term is relatively recent in terms of academic scholarship, with its first known use in 1974 (Foulkes and Docherty, 2006). It is used by phoneticians to refer to descriptive accounts of speech production differences across dialects and styles as well as by sociolinguists to refer to studies that examine relationships between phonetic and phonological form and social factors, with a special focus on language variation and change (Foulkes and Docherty, 2006). In this study, ‘sociophonetic variation’ is used in the sense articulated by Foulkes and Docherty (2006), who describe it as “variable aspects of phonetic or phonological structure in which alternative forms correlate with social factors” (p. 411). 1 I use the term ‘social identity’ in order to maintain consistency with previous work in the field. Social identity, in this case, is used in the sense of macrosociological categories that serve as a proxy for identity, rather than locally constructed microsociological categories. 1 While socioindexicality and sociophonetics as academic appellations have come into use relatively recently, the practice of making judgments about a speaker based on his or her phonetic production is certainly not new. An early documented (and often cited) case appears in the Hebrew Bible, in an account of a military defeat of the Ephraimites that occurred somewhere between 1370 and 1070 BC: Gilead then cut Ephraim off from the fords of the Jordan, and whenever Ephraimite fugitives said, 'Let me cross,' the men of Gilead would ask, 'Are you an Ephraimite?' If he said, 'No,' they then said, 'Very well, say Shibboleth.' If anyone said, 'Sibboleth', because he could not pronounce it, then they would seize him and kill him by the fords of the Jordan. Forty-two thousand Ephraimites fell on this occasion. (Judges 12:5-6, New Jerusalem Bible) Judging social attributes according to phonetic realizations has continued seemingly
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