Stern, Theodore
Changing Both Phonological Rules and Word Exemplars in Second Dialect
Acquisition
The most striking feature of White South African English (WSAE) has been
argued to be the PIN/KIN split (Wells 1982; Bowerman 2008) and has been
documented and analysed (to name just a few: Lanham 1978,; Jeffery 1982; Bailey
1984). It is said that in this variety the short-/i/ phoneme does not rhyme:
1) the bilabial plosive of PIN conditions an allophone [ə] and,
2) the velar of KIN conditions a higher, more front allophone, either [i] or [ɪ̈ ],
which then becomes a homophone of KEEN (Lass 2002).
Acoustic analyses of WSAE have shown that there does exists a great deal of
variation in short-/i/ (Webb 1983; Bekker 2008); however, no acoustic study has
found a categorical split between the two allophones based on context alone, nor any
overlap in the acoustic space between allophones of short-/i/ with other vowel
phoneme categories. In this talk I present an experiment where a categorical and
consistent allophonic split, conditioned by consonantal context, was found between
the two short-/i/ allophones in WSAE. This was done within a simulated codeswitching task and when word cognate-status was controlled for during statistical
analysis.
English in South Africa has been in intense contact with Afrikaans for almost
200 years, and is widely recognised as a distinct variety of English. The two
allophonic variants of short-/i/ in WSAE have been traditionally considered as
Afrikaans influence (Lanham & Macdonald 1979; Taylor 1991), due to the presence
of both [i]~[ɪ̈] as in [tɪ̈ n] ‘tien’ “ten”, as well as phonemic [ə] as in [mən] ‘min’ ”less”;
such arguments are consistent with observed patterns of phonetic interference (Brière
1986) tand he “perceptual magnet” effect seen in L2 acquisition (Iverson et al, 2003).
Lass & Wright (1986) argue, however, that short-/i/ allophony in SWAE cannot be
due to Afrikaans influence because Afrikaans phonotactics allows for phonemic [ə] in
velar contexts ([əŋk] ‘ink’ “ink”) as well as [ɪ̈ ] in bilabial contexts ([pɪ̈ p] ‘piep’
“beep”).
In my experiment, I recruited bilingual L1 Afrikaans/L2 South African
English speakers (average age of English acquisition = 7.2 years old) who had
recently (within the previous month) relocated to the Greater London (UK) area.
Participants were first asked to read out English words, in citation form, containing
words with both short-/i/ (KIN), long-/i/ (KEEN), as well as schwa (commA). Results
similar to those found by Bekker (2008) were obtained, with substantial variation of
short-/i/ tokens with fronted and heightened variants in velar contexts and centralised
variants in bilabial contexts. Similarly, no overlap was found with the other vowel
categories. Subjects then participated in a code-switching task. When English words
were embedded in Afrikaans phrases, the short-/i/ allophones of the participants’
English overlapped substantially with tokens containing long-/i/ and schwa in the
participants’ Afrikaans. The words were then split into different categories based on
cognate status. For those words which were cognates (English “ink” and Afrikaans
[əŋk] ‘ink’ “ink”), centralised productions closely resembling schwa were found,
regardless of consonantal context. Non-cognates were produced with vowels that
approximated long-/i/ in velar contexts and with more centralised allophones in
bilabial contexts. Most importantly, once the cognate forms were no longer analysed
with non-cognates, there was a greater degree of overlap of fronted short-/i/ with
English long-/i/, as well as the centralised short-/i/ allophone with the commA vowel
([ə]). This suggests that, in non-cognate forms, there is categorical and consistent
interphonemic variation and this effect is most pronounced when in “Afrikaans
English” mode.
These results suggest Afrikaans influence as a likely source for the observed
pattern in WSAE, and contributes to our understanding of how both phonetic and
lexical features can contribute to unexpected phonological structural change in a
language contact situation.
The same experiment was repeated four months later with the same
participants, who had now been residing and working in the UK for five months total.
The participants now fell into four groups:
1) Participants who had no statistically significant change in the mean F1/F2
values of any of the words, regardless of cognate status;
2) Participants who had re-merged allophones on uncommon and novel
words, but whose cognates still showed variation between the high front
value and schwa;
3) Participants who maintained a merger in uncommon and novel words, but
had a stable target for high-frequency cognates;
4) Participants who had re-merged allophones on uncommen and novel
words and also had a stable target for high-frequency cognates.
These interesting results point to the possibility that both phonological rules
word exemplars may be considered psychologically realities for the phoneticsphonology interface. These results, which show that both rules and words which may
be modified on an individual basis due to experience, suggest a dual-route (Coltheart,
Rastle, Perry, Langdon, & Ziegler; 2001) model of production.