| Popis: |
This paper investigates perceptions of a feature of the “California Vowel Shift” (Eckert, 2004): the backing of the TRAP vowel. The present study probes whether or not Californian and non-Californian listeners exhibit knowledge of TRAP backing's dialectal patterning in perception. An American English speaker's TRAP vowel was manipulated to create a 9-step continuum from /a/ to /ae/ in a sentence frame. 144 native U.S. listeners heard one of these steps, accompanied by orthographic information about the word spoken (e.g., the word was explicitly given as “blocked” or “blacked"). Listeners provided social categorizations of the speaker. Listeners were more likely to categorize the speaker as Californian when presented with TRAP orthography (e.g., “blacked") paired with a token on the continuum that was closer to /a/. 60 listeners participated in a phoneme categorization task using the same manipulated stimuli. When listeners were told that a speaker was from California, they were more likely to place the bou... |
