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Programme: accepted abstracts

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Abstract ID: 1333

Part of Session 157: Dialect Perceptions in the City (Other abstracts in this session)

Production and Perception of the Viennese dark lateral

Authors: Moosmüller, Sylvia
Submitted by: Moosmüller, Sylvia (Austrian Academy of Sciences, Austria)

Introduction

The phoneme inventory of the Viennese dialect contains one lateral – an alveolar lateral approximant. In certain phonetic contexts, namely word-initially, after alveolar and postalveolar consonants, and between back vowels, this lateral is velarised. Moreover, unlike other velar or velarised laterals, the air escapes only on one side of the tongue. This velarised, monolateral articulation of the lateral (dark lateral) is restricted to the area of Vienna and is, highly salient and subjected to negative evaluation. Moreover, the process of velarisation is mainly applied by male Viennese dialect speakers, female Viennese dialect speakers avoid the application of this process (Moosmüller 2011).

Salient features are strongly susceptible to stereotyping; i. e., the production of the dark lateral is linked up with attributes such as “Viennese”, “uneducated”, “plebeian”, or “aggressive”. In imitation, speakers employ stereotypical features (e.g. Preston 1992, Neuhauser & Simpson 2007; for a different view see Evans 2002). Again, in evaluating a dialect or an accent as authentic or imitated, listeners strongly rely on stereotypical patterns and fail in correctly teasing apart the authentic from the imitated voices (see e.g., Neuhauser & Simpson 2007).

The current presentation will add to the discussion whether listeners rely on stereotypes only or whether they additionally make use of phonological and phonetic knowledge.

Method

Five actors and actresses and ten speakers of the Viennese dialect were asked to transform a text into the Viennese dialect. For the perception test, 180 listeners judged a list of 50 utterances taken from the read texts with respect to their dialect authenticity.

Results

Overall, none of the actors/actresses passed off as a Viennese dialect speaker, because for any speaker, some speech samples were judged as inauthentic. This result corroborates the view that inconsistency in performance is perceived and evaluated accordingly.

The most intriguing result concerns the perception of female speakers. Actresses who produced the velarised lateral were not judged as inauthentic Viennese dialect speakers. This result suggests that the production of the dark lateral is expected to be realised by women.

However, if the application of the dark lateral is overgeneralised to bilabial or velar contexts, this misapplication is judged as inauthentic when produced in strong prosodic positions.

References

Evans, B. (2002), “An Acoustic and Perceptual Analysis of Imitation”, in: D. Long and D.R. Preston (eds.), Handbook of Perceptual Dialectology, Vol. 2, Amsterdam: Benjamins, 95-112.

Preston, D. (1992), “Talkin’ Black and talkin’ White”, in: J.H.Hall, N. Doane and R. Ringler (eds.), English Old and New: Studies in Language and Linguistics in Honor of Frederic G. Cassidy, New York: Garland, 327-355.

Moosmüller, S. (2011), The roles of stereotypes, phonetic knowledge, and phonological knowledge in the evaluation of dialect authenticity. In: Calamai, S. & L. Ciucci (eds) Proceedings of the Workshop “Sociophonetics at the cross-roads of speech variation, processing and communication”, Pisa, 2010: Edizioni della Normale, 49–52.

Neuhauser, S. and A.P. Simpson (2007), “Imitated or Authentic? Listeners’ Judgment of Foreign Accents”, , Proceedings of the 16^th ICPhS, Saarbrücken, 1805-1808.