The Polish language has a complex sibilant structure when compared to languages like English. Of particular interest here are the alveolo-palatal and retroflex sibilants. There have been some previous studies on Polish sibilants examining production and perception of children (under 5 years). However, there is a greater need for understanding adult perception of children’s productions and the perception of different populations listening to children’s productions. Contributing to perception studies would, therefore, allow for a more in-depth analysis of this field of research. This paper builds on the findings of a production-perception study of Polish sibilants in typical children (Zygis et al., 2023) and expands the results by examining English and Heritage Polish population perceptions of Polish children’s productions. The Zygis et al. study examined Polish children and their production and perception of the contrasting sibilants. The study looked at the perception of the children for their own production and adults’ productions. Their study acquired recordings of 80 Polish children aged 35–106 months producing words with /s, ʂ, ɕ/. One of their tasks involved the child participants hearing their own productions of word-medial sibilants: /kasa/, /kaʂa/ and, /kaɕa/ at random. They then had to choose between three images (corresponding to Polish words, e.g.: kasa for cash register) to indicate the stimuli they heard. Their study found that there were a number of acoustic parameters that children used to identify sibilants. They observed that especially the younger children, “appear [to] pay more attention to formants independent of the sibilant and [that] the cue weighting [for these young children] changes during the acquisition process” (Zygis et al., 2023). For the present study, we wanted to explore the perception of these word-medial sibilants for different phonetic environments and for non-native listener populations. The three phonetic conditions included: the whole word as in the original study, the isolated sibilant, and the (isolated) sibilant together with the preceding vowel. The audio files (taken from Zygis et al, 2023) were edited and played to both native English and Polish Heritage listeners at McMaster University in Hamilton, to determine the perception of the three-way Polish sibilant distinction. This distinction is non-existent in English for English listeners or influenced by both Heritage and English phonetics/phonology for Heritage speakers. The sibilant distinction in English lies between /s/ and /ʃ/, therefore the task for the English native participants was to choose between buttons that indicated “kasa | as | s” (for the /s/ sibilant) or “kasha | ash | sh” (for /ʃ/) to indicate which sibilant they perceived. The Heritage speakers of Polish were English participants with varying levels of Polish fluency residing in the Southern Ontario area. They used the same design (three-way sibilant distinction) as the original study. A total of 41 English and 13 Heritage listeners participated in the study. It was hypothesized that the English native listeners would categorize all Polish alveolars as (English) alveolars, but it was not clear how retroflex and alveolo-palatal contrasts from the children’s complex productions would be resolved by the English listeners. It was further assumed that the perception of stimuli with vowel transitions (e.g., /kasa/ and /as/ in contrast to isolated /s/) would significantly differ comparing English listeners and Polish Heritage listeners. In our results, English participants increasingly categorized all manipulations of /s/ as /s/, and /ɕ/ as the /ʃ/ sibilant, especially for the older children’s productions. Their perceptions for the retroflex /ʂ/ was split, half as /s/ perceptions, across conditions. Phonetic information in the form of formants (on top of the spectral noise of the isolated sibilant) did not significantly improve distinction for the English participants. The Polish Heritage speakers showed difficulty in correctly identifying /ʂ/ variations especially in the older children. Phonetic environment and age had varying effects depending on the sibilant. As Polish Heritage participants are familiar with three-way sibilant contrasts, it was interesting to see how these Heritage speakers’ classification differed from that of English participants, especially for stimuli from children who are in the very initial stages of speech development (i.e., decreased articulatory and acoustic accuracy). / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc) / Unfamiliar speech sounds are often labelled into sounds of familiar, acoustic categories. The perception of foreign speech sounds is relevant and interesting to study in Canada with its diverse linguistic pool. As fascinating it would be to study many foreign languages, the focus of our study will be on one particular language and, more specifically, one group of speech sounds. This paper explores the findings of a production-perception study on Polish sibilants (“a type of consonant sound where the tip of the tongue is brought near the roof of the mouth for the air to be pushed past to make hiss sounds (ex: s, z, sh, zh in English))”. Encyclopedia Britannica) in typical children and the perception of their productions by others. This study builds on previous work done by Zygis and colleagues (2023) that focused on Polish children's production, self-perception, and native Polish adults' perception of sibilant productions. The child participants were aged 35-106 months and produced words with the sounds /s, ʂ, ɕ/. These symbols are standardized representations of sounds in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) that correspond to speech sounds that may be present in languages. For our study, the audio recordings (from Zygis et al., 2023) were manipulated and played to native English speakers at McMaster University to determine their distinction of the three sibilant contrasts /s, ʂ, ɕ/, which do not exist in English. In English, there is a two-way distinction of the previously mentioned sibilants which is represented by the IPA symbol /s/ (as in “[s]ake”) and /ʃ/ (like in “[sh]ake”). The goal was to observe how the English participants categorized /s, ʂ, ɕ/ into either /s/ and /ʃ/. Another round of the experiment was done with native English participants with varying Polish fluency residing in the Ontario area to capture their perception of the manipulated sibilant stimuli. English participants increasingly categorized all manipulations of /s/ as /s/ and /ɕ/ as the /ʃ/ sibilant, especially with the older children. Their perceptions for the retroflex /ʂ/ was split, half as /s/ perceptions, across conditions. Phonetic information in the form of vowel information (on top of the isolated sibilant information) did not significantly improve sibilant distinction for the English participants. The Polish Heritage speakers showed difficulty in correctly identifying /ʂ/ variations, especially in the older children. Phonetic environment and age had varying effects depending on the sibilant. The findings from this study contribute to our understanding of cross-language differences in the acquisition of foreign speech sounds. Note, that acquisition here refers to learning of speech sounds, which does not mean perfection but rather the process of developing the sounds. Our findings contribute to child-produced Polish sibilants and yield further insight into the acoustic characteristics that listeners rely on in making perceptual judgments of foreign sounds.

The dissertation describes a change in apparent time in the pronunciation of sibilants in the consonant cluster /str/. The empirical investigation of this feature in interviews from Austin shows a lower frequency profile for the sibilant in this cluster when compared to other sibilant productions. This acoustic characterization is indicative of the retraction of the tongue in the production of the sibilant. The further sociophonetic investigation provides statistical evidence for a change in apparent time that is affected mostly by sibilant duration and ethnic identification of the speaker. Additional qualitative analyses further support the interpretation of this process as a change from below.

In binyan hitpa'el, the reflexive and reciprocal verbal conjugation in Modern Hebrew, the /t/ of the /hit-/ prefix categorically metathesizes with a following sibilant (/s/, /z/, /∫/, or /t⁀s/), giving forms like [histakel] instead of expected forms like *[hitsakel]. It has been theorized that this metathesis may be perceptual, serving to place the /-t-/ in prevocalic position where it can be better perceived by listeners, the direction of metathesis being the more common sibilant + stop sequence in Modern Hebrew (Hume 2004), or that it may be auditory, based on a tendency for the sibilant noise to decouple from the rest of the speech stream, resulting in listener confusion about the place of the sibilant within the word (Blevins & Garrett 2004). Based on data from a speech perception experiment using English speakers, who listened to masked stimuli similar to hitpa'el verbs, I argue that Blevins & Garrett (2004)'s account is correct, with English speaking listeners evincing a tendency to misperceive stop + sibilant sequences as sibilant + stop sequences, despite the higher frequency of stop + sibilant sequences in English.

Martin Vančura - Diplomová práce (2012) Evolution of phonological contrat in sibilants - typological analysis Abstract: The goal of this paper is to employ the paradigm of Greenbergian language typology to process diachronic data originating in the field of historical linguistics. In the first few chapters, I discuss both disciplines and identify some of the pitfalls of such an endeavour. The substance of this paper lies in chapter 4 where I try to demonstrate a real utilization of this diachronic typology on a specific set of data, represented by documented cases of the evolution of sibilants. Then I analyse the precise articulatory and evolutionary character of the sibilants in selected branches of the Indo- European language family and selected languages of the world and I attempt to uncover the common evolutionary tendencies of their sibilant systems. At the end of this chapter, I construct a map of sibilants' evolutionary trajectories and I propose some remarks on the general phonetics and phonology of sibilants.

This thesis examines phonetic variation of /s/ in bilingual French and German gay and straight men. Previous studies have shown sibilant variation, specifically the voiceless sibilant /s/, to correlate with constructions of gay identity and 'gay sounding voices' in both production and perception. While most of this work concerns English, researchers have also explored /s/ variation and sexual orientation or non-normative masculinity in Afrikaans, Danish, Hungarian, and Spanish. Importantly, with the exception of only a small number of studies, this body of work has largely left the realm of /s/ variation and sexual orientation in bilingual speakers unexplored, and furthermore there is very little work which examines these voices in the context of French and German. The analyses show that some gay French and German men produce /s/ with a higher centre of gravity (CoG) and more negative skew than the straight speakers of the study, a result which dovetails with previous studies in languages such as English. Unlike English however, French and German listeners do not appear to associate /s/ variation with sexual orientation or (non)normative masculinities. I argue that the gay speakers who produce /s/ with a higher CoG than the other speakers of the study are doing so as a way to distance themselves from hegemonic masculinity. This thesis is structured into three stand-alone journal articles bookended with introductory and conclusion chapters which tie them together in the broader picture of /s/ variation and French/German speakers and listeners. The first of the three articles expands upon the previously established linguistic framework of indexing gayness by exploring /s/ variation in native and non-native speech, examining how the linguistic construction of gay identity interacts between their English production and the constraints of their native language. The data draws on read speech of 19 gay and straight French and German men across their L1 and L2 English to explore the social meaning of /s/. Results show that some gay speakers produce /s/ with a higher centre of gravity (CoG) and more negative skew than the straight speakers. These results are consistent with previous findings, which show sibilant variation to index sexual orientation in monolingual gay men's speech, and provide evidence of this feature correlating with sexual orientation in French and German. Furthermore, the results presented here call for a greater level of inquiry into how the gay speakers who employ this feature construct their gay identities beyond a purely gay/straight dichotomy. The second study reports the results of a cross-linguistic matched guise test examining the role of /s/ variation and pitch in judgements of sexual orientation and non-normative masculinity in English, French, and German listeners. Listeners responded to manipulations of /s/ and pitch in their native language and all other stimuli languages (English, French, German, and Estonian). All listener groups rate higher pitch stimuli as more gay and more effeminate sounding than lower pitch guises. However, only the English listeners hear [s+] guises as sounding more gay and more effeminate than the [s] or [s-] guises. This effect is seen not only in their native language, but across all stimuli languages. French and German listeners, despite previous evidence showing /s/ to vary according to sexual orientation in men's speech, do not hear [s+] guises as more gay or more effeminate in any of the stimuli languages including their native French or German. The final of the three articles takes the findings of the first two papers and attempts to reconcile the production/perception mismatch seen when comparing the results of the first two papers. The first article in this thesis revealed two groups of speakers which form the basis for analysis for this paper. The first group is a heterogeneous group of gay and straight speakers whose average /s/ productions are below 7,000 Hz ([s] speakers) and the second is a homogeneous group of gay speakers producing average /s/ CoG above 7,000 Hz ([s+] speakers). The analysis shows style shifting across task type with both groups of speakers producing higher /s/ CoG productions in L1 read speech contexts than any of the L2 speech contexts. Style shifting across conversation topic reveals that the [s+] speakers are producing higher /s/ CoG when discussing their coming out stories and topics of LGBT involvement. I argue that these [s+] speakers are employing these higher frequency /s/ variants to construct a very specific and identifiable gay persona, that of a counter-hegemonic effeminate gay man. This thesis is among the first to examine phonetic qualities of gay bilingual speakers and the ways in which they may index their sexual orientation. The inclusion of bilingual French and German speakers adds to our growing knowledge of ways in which these individuals navigate and construct their identities within both their L1 and, specifically, within an L2. In this regard, this thesis contributes to the growing body of knowledge concerning socioindexicality in L2 production more generally. This work thus speaks to these gaps within the sociolinguistic literature and provides strong evidence that /s/ variation is a valuable resource for some French and German men in the construction of a certain type of gay identity.