Walker

Phonetic information affects grammaticality judgements

Abby Walker

Department of Linguistics, University of Canterbury, New Zealand; ajw129@gmail.com

Grammaticality judgements (GJs) are frequently used by syntacticians to ascertain whether or not a particular construction is permitted in a language. This poster describes an experiment that tested whether GJs could be affected by phonetic detail. A socially-meaningful phonetic variable in New Zealand English (NZE) was manipulated in grammatically standard and non-standard constructions. There were significant differences between the ratings given to the sentence with a conservative realisation of the variable and an innovative realisation, and the size and direction of these differences was dependent on, amongst other factors, the ability of the variants to alter the class rating of speakers. Not only are the methodological implications of this study non-trivial, but the findings also pose questions about the storage and access of constructions.

Fifty sentences that ended with a phrase-final /t/ were specially designed and recorded for the experiment. Phrase-final /t/ is a socially conditioned variable in NZE (Docherty et al., 2006) that is mostlyrealized as an unreleased, glottalized variant, and is most likely to be released if the speaker is an older, professional female. The sentences used contained a range of constructions: good sentences which were considered to have standard constructions, bad sentences which contained constructions that no native speaker would be expected to use, and three socially variable constructions - preterite come and done and possessive HAVE-got - which have all been documented as being more frequent in the speech of younger, non-professionals (Quinn, 2000). The fifty recordings used in the experiment were ones where the five female speakers had produced glottalization before also releasing the final /t/. By manually cutting the release from the recording, we had a sentence with the innovative, unreleased variant, and the original uncut recording had the opposing conservative, released variant. Two pilot studies (one is described in Walker, 2007) that included both versions of the recordings showed that the age and social class ratings of the speakers were significantly higher with the conservative variant.

In this experiment, participants were asked to rate the grammaticality of the sentences on a six point scale, where 6 meant the sentence was 'completely grammatical' and 1 meant that it was 'completelyungrammatical'. The two versions of the manipulated sentences were presented dispersed between an additional sixty filler sentences. Thirty people participated in the experiment.

The data was analyzed with a hand-fit linear regression model. The age and social class ratings given to the sentences in one of the pilot studies were included as independent effects. Included in factors that affected the overall grammaticality ratings of the manipulated sentences was the average age rating the particular token had garnered in the pilot. This worked such that the older the rating of a speaker in a particular sentence, the more grammatical the sentence was rated with the innovative variant.

To explicitly test the size and direction of any differences in the rating of the conservative compared to the innovative version of a sentence, the difference between the two was put into another series of linear regression models as the dependent effect. A factor that was significant in the size and direction of the difference was how much the released /t/ had raised the class ratings in the pilot. The more a token had garnered a higher social class rating for the speaker with the conservative compared to the innovative realisation, the more people rated the sentence as more grammatical with the innovative variant. When we looked at each type of sentence individually, this effect seemed to be being carried primarily by the sociallyvariable come sentences.

The results suggest that participants found the sentences more grammatical when they believed the speaker was younger or of a lower social class (class and age were highly correlated). For the same reason, in the same way, the socially salient realisation of the phrase-final /t/ affected the grammaticality ratings of the sentences. The fact that the effect appears to be carried primarily by the come sentences, which are said mostly by younger, non-profesional speakers, suggests the direction of the effect could be due to the wayparticipants treat encountered constructions: they store them complete with speaker information.

Laboratory Phonology 11 151

LabPhon abstractsedited by Paul Warren

Wellington, New Zealand30 June - 2 July 2008 Abstract accepted after review

Walker

The grammaticality of sentences is not usually considered in terms of speaker or phonetic factors. This study shows that socially-meaningful phonetic variation can alter the grammaticality ratings given to sentences in a predictable fashion. This poses serious methodological issues for those who would present stimuli for judgement in an auditory form (see Kitagawa & Fodor, 2006), because judgments could be affected by such extra-linguistic information. One could also argue, however, that the social and phonetic effects seen here are not in fact external to the grammar, but rather that this sort of information is intrinsically tied to how we store, access and process constructions.

References Docherty, G., Hay, J., & Walker, A. (2006). Sociophonetic patterning of phrase-final /t/ in New Zealand English. In P.

Warren & C. Watson (Eds.), Proceedings of the 11th Australasian International Conference on Speech Science & Technology (pp. 378-383). Canberra: Australian Speech Science & Technology Association Inc.

Kitagawa, Y., & J. D. Fodor (2006). Prosodic Influence on Syntactic Judgements. In G. Fanselow, C. Fery, R. Vogel & M. Schlesewsky (Eds.), Gradience in Grammar (pp. 336– 358). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Quinn, H. (2000). Variation in New Zealand English syntax and morphology. In A. Bell & K. Kuiper (Eds.), New Zealand English (pp. 173-197). Wellington: Victoria University Press.

Walker, A. (2007). The effect of phonetic detail on perceived speaker age and social class. In J. Trouvain & W. J. Barry (Eds.), Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (pp. 1453-1456). Saarbrucken, Germany.

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