1 the effect of a single formant on dialect identification

The notes and articles in this series are progress reports on work being carried on by students and faculty in the Department. Because these papers are not finished products, readers are asked not to cite from them without noting their preliminary nature. The authors welcome any comments and suggestions that readers might offer. 1 JAMES GRAMA Labov (2001:167–68) makes the claim that English speech communities use F 2 in vowels to establish social identity, while they use F 1 chiefly for the cognitive differentiation of vowel phonemes. However, little work has been done to address whether this observation holds in perception. By using a forced-choice, matched-guise experiment, this paper investigates whether variations in a single formant can shift perceptions of a speaker's regional origin. Results suggest that when the F 1 of DRESS is low, the vowel is more reliably rated as Californian, suggesting that depending on the vowel, both formants may be important in the perception of social identity. 1. INTRODUCTION. Labov (2001:167–68) argues for the social pre-eminence of the second formant and states that English speech communities seem to use " F 1 for cognitive or categorical differentiation, and differences in F 2 for establishing social identity. " While vowel height has been shown in the phonetics literature to be perceptually important in the categorization of vowel phonemes (Ladefoged and Broadbent 1956), little work in sociophonetics has explicitly investigated whether specific formants (e.g., F 2) play a role in conveying social identity. Vowel stimuli in sociolinguistic experiments are usually manipulated in both F 1 and F 2 (Niedzielski 1999; Hay and Drager 2010). This makes it difficult to determine the effect that a single formant has on dialect identification. Using electronically manipulated vowel stimuli of the short front vowels KIT, DRESS, and TRAP 2 from speakers of California English (CalE), this study investigates Labov's claim about the social pre-eminence of the second formant in perception 3 and experimentally tests whether listeners identify dialect differences using F 2 more reliably than F 1 .