TY - JOUR
T1 - Individual Differences in the Adoption of Sound Change
AU - Voeten, Cesko C.
N1 - Funding Information:
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work is part of the research programme Watching Dutch Change with project number PGW-15-15, which is (partly) financed by the Dutch Research Council (NWO).
Funding Information:
I am grateful to my dissertation supervisors, Claartje Levelt and Yiya Chen, for their feedback and discussions from the set-up of the experiments to the final version of this paper. I also thank three reviewers of Language and Speech as well as its editors for their insightful and comprehensive comments. I am indebted to Katja Lubina for her enthusiastic help in recruiting the migrant participants, and to Sjef Barbiers, who also got me in touch with a number of suitable individuals. I wish to thank Rob Hartsuiker and Wouter Broos for allowing me to use the lab facilities at Ghent University, and I thank Aliza Glasbergen-Plas for her willingness to record the stimuli used in the rhyme-decision task. Finally, of course, I extend my gratitude to the 106 participants who were willing to take part in the experiments reported here. The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work is part of the research programme Watching Dutch Change with project number PGW-15-15, which is (partly) financed by the Dutch Research Council (NWO).
Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2020.
PY - 2021/9
Y1 - 2021/9
N2 - It is still unclear whether an individual’s adoption of on-going sound change starts in production or in perception, and what the time course of the adoption of sound change is in adult speakers. These issues are investigated by means of a large-scale (106 participants) laboratory study of an on-going vowel shift in Dutch. The shift involves the tense mid vowels /eː,øː,oː/, which are changing into phonologically conditioned upgliding diphthongs, and the original diphthongs /εi,œy,ɔu/, whose nuclei are lowering. These changes are regionally stratified: they have all but completed in the Netherlands, but have not affected the variety of Dutch spoken in neighboring Belgium. The study compares production (word-list reading) and perception (rhyme decision) data from control groups from each country to those of 18 “sociolinguistic migrants”: Belgian individuals who moved to the Netherlands years ago. Data are analyzed using mixed-effects models, considering not just the group level, but also individual differences. Production results show that at the group level, the migrant group is in between the two control groups, but at the individual level it becomes apparent that some migrants have adopted the Netherlandic norms, but others have not. Perception results are similar to the production results at the group level. Individual-level results do not provide a clear picture for the perception data, but the individual differences in perception correlate with those in production. The results agree with and extend previous findings on the role of individual differences in the individual adoption and eventual community propagation of on-going sound change.
AB - It is still unclear whether an individual’s adoption of on-going sound change starts in production or in perception, and what the time course of the adoption of sound change is in adult speakers. These issues are investigated by means of a large-scale (106 participants) laboratory study of an on-going vowel shift in Dutch. The shift involves the tense mid vowels /eː,øː,oː/, which are changing into phonologically conditioned upgliding diphthongs, and the original diphthongs /εi,œy,ɔu/, whose nuclei are lowering. These changes are regionally stratified: they have all but completed in the Netherlands, but have not affected the variety of Dutch spoken in neighboring Belgium. The study compares production (word-list reading) and perception (rhyme decision) data from control groups from each country to those of 18 “sociolinguistic migrants”: Belgian individuals who moved to the Netherlands years ago. Data are analyzed using mixed-effects models, considering not just the group level, but also individual differences. Production results show that at the group level, the migrant group is in between the two control groups, but at the individual level it becomes apparent that some migrants have adopted the Netherlandic norms, but others have not. Perception results are similar to the production results at the group level. Individual-level results do not provide a clear picture for the perception data, but the individual differences in perception correlate with those in production. The results agree with and extend previous findings on the role of individual differences in the individual adoption and eventual community propagation of on-going sound change.
KW - individual differences
KW - laboratory phonology
KW - perception and production
KW - sociophonetics
KW - Sound change
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85093960312&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1177/0023830920959753
DO - 10.1177/0023830920959753
M3 - Article
C2 - 33103570
AN - SCOPUS:85093960312
SN - 0023-8309
VL - 64
SP - 705
EP - 741
JO - Language and Speech
JF - Language and Speech
IS - 3
ER -