Rachel Soo (UBC) will present a colloquium at the Henry Angus building (Room 098), on March 31st between 3:30PM and 5:00PM
Abstract: In Hong Kong Cantonese, /n/ is categorically produced as [l] syllable-initially in a diachronic sound change that has been observed since the early twentieth century (Ball, 1907; Cheng et al., 2022). In this sound change, words such as nou5 腦 “brain”, historically pronounced with /n/ are pronounced with [l], producing homophones with pre-existing /l/-initial words, such as lou5 老 “old”. Sociolinguistic work has shown that these pronunciations bear social weight ([n] pronunciations are prestige variants, while [l] pronunciations are socially stigmatized as “lazy pronunciations”; Cheng, 2017; Pan, 1981) but little work has examined the consequences of these sound changes for speech perception and lexical processing. I test Cantonese talkers on the perception, recognition, and encoding of these sound change pronunciation variants through four online experiments. An immediate repetition priming paradigm with [l] targets (Experiment 1) demonstrates recognition equivalence between [n] and [l] forms, in spite of clear phonetic sensitivity to [n] and [l] in AX discrimination (Experiment 2a) and categorization tasks (Experiment 2b). A long distance repetition priming task (Experiment 3) establishes recognition equivalence in long term recognition as well, suggesting listeners encode both pronunciation variants by dually mapping them to a single lexical representation (Samuel & Larraza, 2015). These data suggest that regular exposure to sound change variants supports perceptual flexibility to multiple phonetic forms on a language-specific basis. This study contributes to our understanding of the [n]-[l] sound change and uniquely situates the study of phonetic variation, which has traditionally been studied through the lens of within-/cross-dialect pronunciation variants, in the context of diachronic sound change variants.
