This thesis investigates predictions of an exemplar account of syntax, by testing whether manipulating socially salient phonetic detail can alter the grammaticality judgements given to morpho-syntactic constructions in New Zealand English (NZE). Three experiments are were conducted as part of this thesis. The first tested the social saliency of different phonetic variables in NZE, and found phrase final /t/, which can be realised with or without a release, to be strongest. In the second experiment, phrase final /t/ was tested further, and manipulating the release significantly altered both the age and class ratings given to speakers. The way in which it did this reflected the patterns documented in production. In the third experiment, participants were asked to rate the grammaticality of the same sentences. When the results of the previous experiment were included in the statistical model, an effect of the variant came out as significant. The more participants had rated a speaker as older with the released variant in the previous experiment, the less they rated the sentence as grammatical with the released variant. That is, only the most socially salient realisations were able to alter perceived grammaticality. Overall, the results of this thesis suggest that speaker information and pho- netic detail can affect grammaticality judgements. This supports an exemplar model of syntax. Regardless of the theoretical implications of the findings however, the methodological ones are clear. If speakers and realisations of certain phonetic variables can alter grammaticality judgements, then they must be controlled for in the presentation of stimuli to participants.

It is argued that infants build a foundation for learning about the world through their incidental acquisition of the spatial and temporal regularities surrounding them. A challenge is that learning occurs across multiple contexts whose statistics can greatly differ. Two artificial language studies with 12-month-olds demonstrate that infants come prepared to parse statistics across contexts using the temporal and perceptual features that distinguish one context from another. These results suggest that infants can organize their statistical input with a wider range of features that typically considered. Possible attention, decision making, and memory mechanisms are discussed.

This thesis reports on findings from a year-long sociolinguistic ethnography at an all girls’ high school in New Zealand which is referred to as Selwyn Girls’ High (SGH). The study combines the qualitative methods of ethnography with the quantitative methods of acoustic phonetic analysis and experimental design. At the school, there were a number of different groups (e.g. The PCs, The Pasifika Group, The BBs), each forming a community of practice where the different members actively constructed their unique social personae within the context of the group. There was a dichotomy between the groups based on whether they ate lunch in the common room (CR) or not (NCR) and this division reflected the individual speakers’ stance on whether they viewed themselves as “normal” or different from other girls at the school. In-depth acoustic analysis was conducted on tokens of the word like from the girls’ speech. This is a word with a number of different pragmatic functions, such as quotative like (I was LIKE “yeah okay”), discourse particle like (It was LIKE so boring), and lexical verb like (I LIKE your socks). The results provide evidence of acoustically gradient variation in the girls’ realisations of the word like that is both grammatically and socially conditioned. For example, quotative like was more likely to have a shorter /l/ to vowel duration ratio and be less diphthongal than either discourse particle like or grammatical like and there was a significant difference in /k/ realisation depending on a combination of the token’s pragmatic function and whether the speaker ate lunch in the CR or not. Additionally, three speech perception experiments were conducted in order to examine the girls’ sensitivity to the relationship between phonetic variants, lemma-based information, and social factors. The results indicate that perceivers were able to distinguish between auditory tokens of the different functions of like in a manner that was consistent with trends observed in production. Perceivers were also able to extract social information about the speaker depending on phonetic cues in the stimuli. Taken together, the results provide evidence that lemmas with a shared wordform can have different phonetic realisations, that individuals can manipulate these realisations in the construction of their social personae, and that individuals can use lemma-based phonetic trends from production to identify a word. These results have implications for how phonetic, lemma, and social information are stored in the mind and, together, they are used to inform a unified model of speech production, perception and identity construction.

An acoustic comparison of sung and spoken vowels for three New Zealand singers investigates the phonetics of pronunciation in popular music. The singers recited the lyrics to their songs and recordings of their sung vocals were also obtained, creating a dataset of paired sung and recited words. Interviews with the singers were conducted so that the pronunciation used in reciting could be compared with a more conversational style. Eight vowels were analysed in these three conditions: DRESS, TRAP, THOUGHT, LOT, START, GOOSE, GOAT and PRICE. As well as providing data for phonetic analysis, the interviews elicited information about the singers’ musical influences, and investigated the singers’ stances towards the use of New Zealand English (NZE) in singing. The results of the comparison of singing and speech reflect the singers’ various stances to some extent. Overall, however, there are strikingly few cases where pairs of sung and spoken vowels have similar pronunciations. The predominance of ‘American’ vowels in the singing of all three participants, despite stated intentions to use New Zealand forms, suggests that the American-influenced singing style is the default in this context. This finding contrasts with early research on singing pronunciation in popular music, which described the use of American pronunciation in pop music as an act of identity which involved effort and awareness (Trudgill, 1983). The results presented here support the claims of more recent studies which suggest, conversely, that it is the use of non-American accent features which requires a wilful act of identity (Beal, 2009; O'Hanlon, 2006). An important consideration in the interpretation of vowel differences between singing and speech is the role played by the act of singing itself. It has been argued that there may be a general preference for increased sonority in singing (Morrissey, 2008) which would lead to the use of more open vowel sounds. This issue is explored and some evidence is found for a sonority-related effect. However, singing inherent effects like this can only explain a portion of the variability between singing and speaking. Most of the differences between singing and speech appear to be caused by social and stylistic motivations. To investigate why American-influenced pronunciation might be the default in the singing of pop music, a perception experiment was conducted to examine the phenomenon from the perspective of the listener. Participants were played words from a continuum that ranged between bed and bad, and they responded by circling whichever word they heard on a response sheet. The perception of ambiguous tokens was found to differ significantly according to whether or not the words were expected to be spoken or sung. These results are discussed with reference to exemplar theories of speech perception, arguing that the differences between singing and speech arise due to context-specific activation of phonetically detailed memories. This perspective can also be applied to the processes which underlie the production of vowels in sung contexts. Singers draw on their memories of popular music when they sing. Their use of American pronunciation in singing is therefore the result of the fact that a majority of their memories of pop singing involve American-influenced phonetic forms.

This dissertation examines the production, perception and processing of the Catalan-specific mid-vowel categories (/e/-/[open-mid front unrounded vowel]/ and /o/-/[open-mid back rounded vowel]/) by early Spanish-Catalan bilinguals in Majorca (Spain). The analyses focus on the lexical as well as the segmental levels to analyze cognate effects in the production and lexical representations of these early bilinguals, and they explore how their production and perception abilities are related. This study provides evidence that early and highly proficient Spanish-Catalan bilinguals in Majorca maintain two independent phonetic categories in the Catalan mid-vowel space. The first significant finding is that production patterns in Majorca differ from those previously reported in Barcelona, as the Catalan mid-vowel contrasts are not merging into a single Spanish-like mid-vowel for either Catalan-dominants or Spanish-dominants. Additionally, these bilinguals are not 'deaf' to the Catalan-specific mid-vowel contrasts: both language dominance groups perceive the contrast between the Catalan mid-vowel categories despite the overlap with one phonetic category in Spanish. Even though Spanish-dominant bilinguals as a whole are indistinguishable from Catalan-dominant bilinguals in the perception and production tasks, they are found to have a higher error rate in the lexical decision task. The comparison of the acoustic properties of the target vowels in Catalan cognate and non-cognate experimental items reveals that the production of the mid-vowels is affected by cognate status, and that these cognate effects are also found in the word recognition of aurally presented stimuli. Finally, bilinguals who produced the mid-vowels with a smaller Euclidean distance are more likely than bilinguals who maintain a more robust contrast in their productions to have a higher error rate in the AXB discrimination and lexical decision tasks. The present study contributes to the discussion regarding the organization of early bilinguals' dominant and non-dominant phonetic systems, and implications are considered for cross-linguistic models of bilingual speech production and perception. It is proposed that the exemplar model of lexical representation (Bybee, 2001; Pierrehumbert, 2001) can be extended to include bilingual lexical connections that can account for the interactions between the phonetic and lexical levels of early bilingual individuals. / text

Submitted by Aline Batista (alinehb.ufpel@gmail.com) on 2017-06-08T15:25:06Z No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) Dissertação - Fernanda Peres Lopes.pdf: 3142979 bytes, checksum: 5720a00dae8803fe8625b52b9c76c001 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Aline Batista (alinehb.ufpel@gmail.com) on 2017-06-09T14:37:22Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 2 Dissertação - Fernanda Peres Lopes.pdf: 3142979 bytes, checksum: 5720a00dae8803fe8625b52b9c76c001 (MD5) license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-06-09T14:37:29Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 Dissertação - Fernanda Peres Lopes.pdf: 3142979 bytes, checksum: 5720a00dae8803fe8625b52b9c76c001 (MD5) license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) Previous issue date: 2017-02-24 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - CAPES / Este estudo tem por objetivo analisar o processo variável de apagamento das vogais átonas [a, i, u] em posição final na fala de indivíduos da cidade de Pelotas (RS), conforme verificado em tarif[a] ~ tarif∅, equip[e] ~ equip∅, serviço ~ serviç∅, por exemplo. Para isso, partiu-se dos pressupostos da Fonologia de Uso (BYBEE, 2001, 2006, 2010), da Teoria de Exemplares (PIERREHUMBERT, 2001, 2003) e da Sociofonética (THOMAS, 2011; FOULKES; SCOBBIE; WATT, 2010). A amostra sob análise é constituída por oito informantes (quatro homens e quatro mulheres) entre 18 e 50 anos de idade e de dois níveis de escolaridade – sujeitos com até seis anos de escolaridade e sujeitos com, no mínimo, nove anos de escolaridade. A taxa de aplicação do apagamento na amostra analisada foi de 53% (N = 242) para a vogal [i], de 41% (N = 196) para a vogal [u] e de 0,8% (N = 4) para a vogal [a]. Os resultados indicaram que fatores como tipo de vogal, contexto precedente, ordem de produção e frequência lexical favorecem o apagamento, revelando a natureza predominantemente linguística do fenômeno. A única variável extralinguística que teve influência no apagamento foi a variável indivíduo. A análise acústica revelou que as vogais postônicas [i] e [u] produzidas pelos pelotenses tendem a abaixar enquanto a vogal [a] tende a elevar-se. Além disso, percebe-se uma centralização de [u], que ocupa, entre os homens, quase o mesmo espaço acústico que a vogal [a]. [ɐ], [ɪ] e [ʊ] são as vogais que representam o sistema encontrado na amostra. Com relação à duração, comparando-se os valores encontrados com os dados de Quintanilha-Azevedo (2016), percebe-se que tanto homens quanto mulheres produziram vogais mais curtas. Por fim, conclui-se que o apagamento representa o ponto final de uma trajetória que se inicia com a realização plena da vogal, passa pela redução de sua duração e pelo seu desvozeamento. / This thesis aims to analyze the variable process of deletion of the final unstressed vowels [a, i, u] by Brazilian Portuguese native speakers from the city of Pelotas, in the Southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, as noticed in words such as tarif[a] ~ tarif∅, equip[e] ~ equip∅, serviço ~ serviç∅, for instance. In order to achieve said aim, the concepts addressed by Usage-Based Phonology (BYBEE, 2001, 2006, 2010), the Exemplar Theory (PIERREHUMBERT, 2001, 2003) and Sociophonetics (THOMAS, 2011; FOULKES; SCOBBIE; WATT, 2010) were used as this research project's theoretical bases. The sample analyzed in this study consists of 8 informants (4 men and 4 women) from two different educational backgrounds (one group including subjects with up to 6 years of formal learning and the other including subjects with 9+ years of formal learning) with ages ranging from eighteen to fifty. The rate of deletion in the sample was of 53% (N = 242) for the vowel [i], of 41% (N = 196) for the vowel [u], and of 0,8% (N = 4) for the vowel [a]. The results indicate that such factors as type of vowel, preceding context, vowel production order and lexical frequency favor deletion, revealing the predominantly linguistic nature of the phenomenon. The variable "subject" was the only extralinguistic variable to influence deletion. Acoustic analysis showed that the posttonic vowels [i] and [u] produced by the subjects tend to lower as the vowel [a] tends to rise. In addition, the study also revealed a centralization of [u], which occupies among men almost the same acoustic vowel space as does the vowel [a]. Vowels [ɐ], [ɪ] and [ʊ] are representative of the system found in the sample. Regarding duration, when comparing the values included in this research project with those presented by Quintanilha-Azevedo (2016), it can be noticed that both men and women produced shorter vowels. Lastly, it was found that deletion represents the final stage of a process that begins with the production of a full-quality vowel, moves on to its reduction, and ultimately reaches the devoicing of said vowel.