Intraspeaker Priming across the New Zealand English Short Front Vowel Shift.

ABSTRACT: A growing body of research in psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics, and sociolinguistics shows that we have a strong tendency to repeat linguistic material that we have recently produced, seen, or heard. The present paper investigates whether priming effects manifest in continuous phonetic variation the way it has been reported in phonological, morphological, and syntactic variation. We analyzed nearly 60,000 tokens of vowels involved in the New Zealand English short front vowel shift (SFVS), a change in progress in which trap/dress move in the opposite direction to kit, from a topic-controlled corpus of monologues (166 speakers), to test for effects that are characteristic of priming phenomena: repetition, decay, and lexical boost. Our analysis found evidence for all three effects. Token

SUBMITTER: Villarreal D 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9326802 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature