Gender and accent in the perception of English syllabic consonants vs. schwa

Inmaculada de Jesús Arboleda Guirao; Rafael Monroy Casas

doi:10.4995/rlyla.2010.750

Authors

Inmaculada de Jesús Arboleda Guirao Universidad de Murcia
Rafael Monroy Casas Universidad de Murcia

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.4995/rlyla.2010.750

Keywords:

English potential syllabic consonants, gender, accent, discourse, perception, BBC speech

Abstract

This paper reports a study on the perception of English syllabic consonants vs. schwa in word final position at discourse level. Our aim is to find out whether gender and accent play a significant role in the perception of potential syllabic consonants, a topic which needs further research (see Takefuta & Black 1966; Bloom, Moore-Schoenmakers & Masataka 1999). Three females indentified a schwa/syllabic consonant in 800 words uttered in specific contextx by 80 non-rhotic native newsreaders (40m/40f) from the BBC Learning English Website. The statistical procedures used were the contingency table analysis and Kendall's correlation coefficient. The study reveals that gender and accent do not perform a significant role in the perception of this alternation. They were found not to influence the referees' perception, their degree of agreement being quite similar in the categories of each variable. The exploration of the schwa vs. syllabic consonant perception in terms of word position (within an utterance) and word emphasis is suggested.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

References

Álvarez, J. (1980). “Syllabic and Non-Syllabic /l/ and /n/”, Atlantis 2-1, 41-48.

Barry, W.J. (1995) “Schwa vs. Schwa+/r/ in German”, Phonetica 52, 228-235.

BBC Learning English Website (2009). From www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/index. shtml [13.9.2009].

BBC Radio 4. (2008). From http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/presenters/#T [14.11.2009].

Bloom, K., Moore-Schoenmakers K. & Masataka N. (1999). “Nasality of Infant Vocalizations Determines Gender Bias in Adult Favorability Ratings”, Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 23-3, 219-236.

Carr, P. (1999). A Glossary of Phonology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Cohen, A. (1957). The Phonemes of English. Mouton: The Hague.

Coleman, J. S. (1999). “The Nature of Vocoids Associated with Syllabic Consonants in Tashlhiyt Berber”, in J. J. Ohala, Hasegawa, Y.; Ohala, V.; Granville, D. & A. Bailey, C. (eds.) Proceedings of The XIVth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. Vol. 1. San Francisco, 735-738.

Coleman, J. S. (2001). “The Phonetics and Phonology of Tashlhiyt Berber Syllabic Consonants”, Transactions of the Philological Society 99-1, 29-64.

Compact Oxford English Dictionary (2009). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Crawford, R. (2008). “A Commercial Identity? The Antipodean Image in London”. Paper Presented at 1st Global Conference. Budapest, Hungary.

Creswell, J.W. (2009). Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative and Mixed Methods Approaches. Sage: Los Angeles.

Diehl, R.L., Lotto, A.J., Holt, L.L. (2004). “Speech Perception”, Annual Review of Psychology 55, 149-179.

García, E. (2006). “The Perception of Lateral Versus Nasal Syllabic Resonants”. Haskins Laboratories, New York City. http://www.haskins.yale.edu/SR/SR013/SR013_06.pdf [15.11.2009].

Gimson, A.C. (1970). An Introduction to the Pronunciation of English. London: University of London Press.

Lehiste, I. (1964). “Acoustical Characteristics of Selected English Consonants”, International Journal of American Linguistics 30-3, 194-197.

Monroy, R. (1980). La Pronunciación del Inglés RP para Hablantes de Español. Madrid: Paraninfo.

Monroy, R. (2008-2009). Fonética inglesa [Class handout]. Murcia: University of Murcia.

Roach, P. (2000). English Phonetics and Phonology: A Practical Course. Cambridge: C.U.P.

Roach, P. (2002). A Little Encyclopedia of Phonetics. Cambridge: C.U.P.

Shaeffer, N. & Eichorn, N. (2001). “The Effects of Differential Vowel Prolongations on Perceptions of Speech Naturalness”, Journal of Fluency Disorders 26-4, 335-348.

Takefuta, Y. & Black, J.W. (1966). “Perception of Foreign Accent in Japanese English by American, British, and Japanese Listeners”, Speech Monographs 33-3, 372-376.

Töft, Z. (2002). “The Phonetics and Phonology of Some Syllabic Consonants in Southern British English”, ZAS Papers in Linguistics 28, 111–44.

Van Bergem, D.R. (1995). “Perceptual and Acoustic Aspects of Lexical Vowel Reduction, a Sound Change in Progress”, Speech Communication, 16-4, 329-358.

Wells, J.C. (1965). “The Phonological Status of Syllabic consonants in English RP”. Phonetica 13, 110-113.

Wells, J.C. (2000). Longman Pronunciation Dictionary. Harlow: Longman.

Xiaonan, S.S. & Maocan, L. (1992). “Concept of Tone in Mandarin Revisited: A perceptual Study on Tonal Coarticulation”, Language Sciences 13-3/4, 421-432.