Intraspeaker Priming across the New Zealand English Short Front Vowel Shift

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Corpus Linguistics
• Sociolinguistics
• Phonetics

Background:

• Research indicates a strong tendency to repeat recently produced, seen, or heard linguistic material.
• Priming effects are well-documented in phonological, morphological, and syntactic variation.
• The New Zealand English short front vowel shift (SFVS) provides a context for studying ongoing phonetic change.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if priming effects manifest in continuous phonetic variation.
• To test for repetition, decay, and lexical boost effects in spontaneous speech.
• To explore the role of phonetic features and speaker characteristics in priming.

Main Methods:

• Analysis of nearly 60,000 vowel tokens from a topic-controlled corpus of monologues (166 speakers).
• Examination of the New Zealand English short front vowel shift (SFVS).
• Statistical testing for repetition, decay, and lexical boost phenomena in phonetic variation.

Main Results:

• Evidence found for repetition, decay, and lexical boost effects in continuous phonetic variation.
• Repetition effects were linked to vowel peripherality rather than the direction of change within the SFVS.
• Stronger repetition effects observed in men compared to women, indicating a gender interaction.

Conclusions:

• Priming phenomena are present in continuous phonetic variation, not just discrete linguistic levels.
• Priming contributes to the structuring of intraspeaker phonetic variation.
• Findings challenge unitary accounts of priming and highlight its complex manifestation.