Abstract
Listeners integrate a wide variety of cues when categorizing speech sounds, including lexical, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic information. We investigate the influence of Initial Consonant Mutation, a morphosyntactically-triggered alternation in the modern Celtic languages, on the categorical perception of stop voicing in Welsh. Once sandhi processes, Celtic mutations are now lexically and morphosyntactically triggered; in particular, Welsh Soft Mutation causes word-initial voiceless stops to become voiced when they are preceded by a triggering word or construction. This paper reports the results of a two-alternative forced choice task that tests the hypothesis that Welsh listeners integrate their knowledge of mutation-triggering environments during speech perception, accepting more ambiguous segments as voiced when preceded by a Soft-Mutation-triggering word relative to a non-triggering word. While the results of the experiment demonstrate categorical perception of stop voicing, no robust effect of mutation environment was found. Several hypotheses as to why the predicted result was not found are considered.
Highlights
Natural speech is characterized by extreme variability
In addition to phonetic cues, listeners recruit lexical, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic information to adjust their perceptual boundaries. We extend this line of research by investigating the influence of Initial Consonant Mutation (ICM) on the categorical perception of stop voicing in Welsh
While this task successfully demonstrated categorical perception of stop voicing in Welsh using the online recruitment and experiment-presentation methods described in Section 2, it did not demonstrate any robust influence of the orthographically-presented morphological environment on phonetic categorization of the following target stop consonant
Summary
Natural speech is characterized by extreme variability (c.f. Warner & Tucker 2011), requiring listeners to integrate a wide variety of cues when categorizing speech sounds incontext. In addition to phonetic cues, listeners recruit lexical, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic information to adjust their perceptual boundaries. We extend this line of research by investigating the influence of Initial Consonant Mutation (ICM) on the categorical perception of stop voicing in Welsh. Welsh Soft Mutation in particular causes word-initial [p, t, k] to become [b, d, g] respectively, following a trigger-word. We hypothesize that Welsh listeners will exploit their knowledge of Soft Mutation-triggering words to adjust their VOT boundary when categorizing word-initial stops, judging more voiceless segments as voiced when preceded by a Soft Mutation trigger relative to a non-trigger.
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