In New Zealand English there is a merger-in-progress of the near and square diphthongs. This paper investigates the consequences of this merger for speech perception. We report on an experiment involving the speech of four New Zealanders-two male, and two female. All four speakers make a distinction between near and square. Participants took part in a binary forced-choice identification task which included 20 near/square items produced by each of the four speakers. All participants were presented with identical auditory stimuli. However the visual presentation differed. Across four conditions, we paired each voice with a series of photos-an "older" looking photo, a "younger" looking photo, a "middle class" photo and a "working class" photo. The middle and working class photos were, in fact, photos of the same people, in different attire. In a fifth condition, participants completed the task with no associated photos. At the end of the identification task, each participant was recorded reading a near/square wordlist, containing the same items as appeared in the perception task. The results show that a wide range of factors influence accuracy in the perception task. These include participant-specific characteristics, word-specific characteristics, context-specific characteristics, and perceived speaker characteristics. We argue that, taken together, the results provide strong support for exemplar-based models of speech perception, in which exemplars are socially indexed. © 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
CITATION STYLE
Hay, J., Warren, P., & Drager, K. (2006). Factors influencing speech perception in the context of a merger-in-progress. Journal of Phonetics, 34(4), 458–484. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2005.10.001
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