Perception of the Boundary Between Singleton and Geminate Plosives by Greek Cypriots: a Sociophonetic Perspective
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Perception of the boundary between singleton and geminate plosives by Greek Cypriots: a sociophonetic perspective. Katarzyna Alexander Doctor of Philosophy University of York Language and Linguistic Science January 2014 Abstract Standard Modern Greek (SMG) and Cypriot Greek (CG), two language varieties used by Greek Cypriots living in Cyprus, differ in their plosive inventories, as CG includes voiceless geminate plosives which are absent in SMG. Words containing geminate plosives may be divided into two groups; in one, replacing a geminate plosive with a singleton plosive changes the meaning of the word, whereas in the other group replacing a geminate with a singleton does not cause any change to the word’s literal meaning. Matched-guise technique (MGT) tests carried out as a part of this study suggest that substituting a singleton plosive [t] with a geminate [t:h] tends to alter the social characteristics attributed to the speaker uttering words containing the target sounds. Forced-choice perceptual tests were carried out with Greek Cypriot listeners in three conditions, (1) in the presence of the Greek flag (symbolising the Greek culture and/or region), (2) in the presence of the Cypriot flag (symbolising the Cypriot culture and/or region), and (3) in the absence of the two flags. The results indicate that the perception of the boundary between singleton and geminate plosives tends to be affected by several variables such as the length of the plosive embedded in the test stimuli, the presence of the flags, the gender of the listeners and the way listeners produced singleton and geminate plosives themselves. Socio-economic background and cultural affiliation of the listeners, which were assumed to be indicators of the amount of exposure to singleton plosives in the discussed context, were also among the variables affecting the perception of the boundary. The results of this study seem to add evidence to some of the assumptions of exemplar theory relating to the importance of amount of exposure to a sound category, the role of acoustic properties of stored exemplars, and processing of indexical information in speech perception. Also, the results of the study appear to suggest that factors such as listeners’ linguistic insecurity or listeners’ satisfaction with their social position might also have an effect on the way they process speech by increasing or decreasing their sensitivity to acoustic properties of sounds. It is suggested that the role of listeners’ linguistic insecurity and the role of their satisfaction with social position in increasing and decreasing sensitivity to phonetic cues should be further investigated in future research and possibly incorporated into models of speech perception. 2 List of contents Abstract 2 List of tables 7 List of figures 10 Acknowledgements 14 Author’s declaration 15 1 Introduction 16 2 Sociolinguistic issues in bidialectal Cyprus 20 2.1 Standard Modern Greek and Cypriot Greek: the role of the varieties in the society 20 2.2 Attitudes towards Standard Modern Greek and Cypriot Greek 23 2.3 Language and identity in the Republic of Cyprus 24 2.4 Conclusion 29 3 Plosives in SMG and CG 30 3.1 Consonant inventories of SMG and CG: the differences 30 3.2 Phonological status of Cypriot geminates (including geminate plosives) 35 3.3 Acoustic and perceptual studies on voiceless plosives in CG 37 3.3.1 Production 37 3.3.2 Perception 47 3.4 Representation of CG gemination in spelling 47 3.5 Conclusion 49 4 Exemplar theory 51 4.1 Category formation and sound perception in ET framework 52 4.1.1 The importance of the amount of exposure 54 4.1.2 The separation of sound categories 58 4.1.3 Indexical information 61 4.2 Speech production in the ET framework 67 4.3 Exemplar theory and the singleton/geminate boundary in Cypriot Greek 68 5 Research questions 70 6 Social evaluation study 77 6.1 Stage 1: collection of data for the social evaluation test stimuli 78 6.1.1 The test word 79 3 6.1.2 The sentences 79 6.1.3 The speakers 80 6.1.4 Preparation of the listening stimuli 80 6.2 Stage 2: attitudinal study 84 6.2.1 Background data 84 6.2.2 Affiliation questionnaire 86 6.2.3 The study participants (listeners/judges) 87 6.2.4 The experiment: matched-guise tests 89 6.3 Ethical considerations 90 6.4 Results 90 6.5 Discussion 97 6.5.1 The social meaning(s) of [t:h] 98 6.5.2 The significance of insignificant results 100 6.5.3 [t:h] and orders of indexicality 101 6.6 Conclusion 109 7 Perceptual study of the [t]-[t:h] boundary 111 7.1 Production of the perceptual stimuli 114 7.1.1 The test words 114 7.1.2 The speakers 116 7.1.3 The recordings: procedure 117 7.1.4 Analysis of the spoken data 118 7.1.5 Preparation of the listening stimuli 121 7.2 Methods used in perceptual tests 124 7.2.1 The study participants (listeners) 124 7.2.2 Perceptual experiments 1 and 2: the procedure 130 7.2.3 Reading task: the procedure 131 7.2.4 Ethical issues 131 7.2.5 Normalisation of CD and VOT values 131 7.3 Perceptual experiments 1 and 2: method of data analysis 133 7.4 Experiment 1: results and discussion 136 7.4.1 Overall results 136 7.4.2 Results by affiliation 142 7.4.3 Results by gender 149 7.4.4 Results by place of residence 153 4 7.5 Experiment 2: results and discussion 156 7.5.1 Overall results 157 7.5.2 Influence of flags 163 7.5.3 Results by affiliation 166 7.5.4 Results by gender 169 7.5.5 Results by place of residence 174 7.6 Experiments 1 and 2 combined data: results and discussion 177 7.6.1 Overall results 177 7.6.2 Results by gender 179 7.6.3 Results by affiliation 183 7.6.4 Results by place of residence 185 7.7 General discussion of all perceptual study results 191 7.7.1 The influence of the parameters of remembered categories 192 7.7.2 The influence of the amount of exposure measured by ID score 205 7.7.3 The influence of the amount of exposure measured with SOCIO index 215 7.7.4 The influence of stimuli duration 222 7.7.5 The influence of flags 224 7.7.6 The influence of gender 231 7.7.7 The influence of the place of residence 231 7.8 Conclusion 232 8 Discussion 233 8.1 Social evaluation of geminate plosives and its significance 233 8.1.1 Justification of the perceptual study methodology 233 8.1.2 Further understanding of attitudes towards CG and SMG 234 8.2 Contribution to research on exemplar theory 235 8.2.1 The role of indexical features in perception 235 8.2.2 The role of the amount of exposure in perception 240 8.2.3 The role of the acoustic properties of stored exemplars 243 8.2.4 The significance of unexpected results: issues for further investigation 245 8.3 Contribution to research on the perception of gemination of plosives in CG 250 8.4 Study limitations 250 8.5 Conclusions 252 5 Appendix 1 Socio-economic background questionnaire 254 Appendix 2 Ways of assigning points for socio-economic background questionnaire answers 256 Appendix 3 An example of an answer sheet in MGT tests 257 Appendix 4 Affiliation questionnaire 258 Appendix 5 A sample of an information sheet given to participants (listeners) in the evaluation study 260 Appendix 6 A sample of an information sheet given to participants (speakers) in the evaluation study 261 Appendix 7 A sample of an information sheet given to participants (listeners) in the perceptual study 262 Appendix 8 A sample of a consent form given to all participants in the perceptual and the evaluation studies 263 Appendix 9 A sample screenshot of a Power Point slide show used in MGT tests 264 Appendix 10 Word list used as a part of the reading task 265 Appendix 11 Screenshots showing the perceptual experiment interface (experiments 1 and 2) 266 Appendix 12 Ratios of tokens labelled as singletons and geminates by listeners in experiments 1 and 2 268 List of abbreviations 272 List of references 274 6 List of tables Page Table 3.1 CG phonemic consonant inventory. 30 Table 3.2 SMG phonemic consonant inventory (based on Arvaniti 2007). 33 Table 3.3 Differences between durations of singleton and geminate consonants. 43 Table 3.4 Summary of mean VOT and CD values in singleton and geminate 44 consonants analysed in several acoustic studies on CG (in ms). Table 3.5 Summary of durations of singleton and geminate consonants analysed by 44 Tserdanelis and Arvaniti (2001) and Muller (2001) in ms. Table 6.1 The carrier phrase with the target sound (the target sound is in bold). 80 Table 6.2 Order of samples in the MGT test. 83 Table 6.3 Values of length of CD, VOT and the whole plosive (PLOS) in Standard 84 Modern Greek (SMG) and Cypriot Greek (CG) (all values given in ms) of all [t:h] speech samples used in the MGT test. Table 6.4 Percentages of ratings given by the judges to sentences with [t] and [t:h]. 91 Table 6.5 T-tests results testing the differences in means of scores assigned to [t:h] 92 and [t] on various traits. Table 6.6 Mann-Whitney results indicating significant differences in scores assigned 92 to [t:h] and [t].