Roadrunners and Eagles

• Authors: Linda Shockey , Małgorzata E. Ćavar
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Our previous research on perception of gated casual English by university students suggests that ceteris paribus, Polish students are much more accurate than Greeks. A recent pilot study of casually-spoken Polish leads us to the conclusion that many shortcuts found in English are also common in Polish, so that similar perceptual strategies can be used in both languages, though differing in detail. Based on these preliminary results, it seems likely that perceptual strategies across languages tend towards the “eagle” approach - where a birds-eye view of the acoustic terrain without too much emphasis on detail is found - or the “roadrunner” approach, where phonetic detail is followed closely. In the former case, perceivers adjust easily to alternation caused by casual speech phonology while in the latter, perceivers expect little variation and possibly even find it confusing. Native speakers of Greek are “roadrunners”, since there is little phonological reduction in their language there is little difference, for example, between stressed and unstressed syllables. We suggest that native speakers of Polish join English speakers as “eagles”, which gives them a natural perceptual advantage in English. There is a conceptual similarity between this idea and that of the stress- or syllable-timed language, and we hypothesise that as in this case, there is a cline rather than a sharp division between eagles and roadrunners. As usual, more research is called for.

Keywords

EN

perception; casual speech processes; prosody

• Publisher: Uniwersytet Łódzki. Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego
• Journal: Research in Language
• Year: 2013
• Volume: 11
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 97-102

Dates

published

2013-03-01

online

2013-05-04

Contributors

author

Linda Shockey

• University of Reading

author

Małgorzata E. Ćavar

• Eastern Michigan University

References

• Bard, E. G., Shillcock, R. C. and Altmann, G. T. M. 1988. The recognition of words after their acoustic offsets in spontaneous speech: effects of subsequent context. Perception and Psychophysics, 44, 395-408.
• Barry, W. J. and Bistra, A. 2001. Cross-language similarities and differences in spontaneous speech patterns, Journal of the International Phonetic Association 31/1, 51-66.
• Grosjean, F. 1980. Spoken word recognition processes and the gating paradigm. Perception & Psychophysics,11, 267-283.
• Nicolaidis, K. 2001. An electropalatographic study of Greek spontaneous speech, Journal of the International Phonetic Association 31/1, 67-86.
• Shockey, L. 2003. Sound Patterns of Spoken English, Blackwell.
• Shockey L. and Bond, Z. 2012. Holistic perception of phonological variants (Holistyczna percepcja wariantów fonologicznych) in Rhythm, melody and harmonyin speech. Studies in honour of Wiktor Jassem. Speech and Language Technology. Vol 14/15. Poznań, Poland, 199-209.
• Stampe, D. 1979. A Dissertation on Natural Phonology. Chicago University Press.

Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/v10015-012-0012-x