Relationship between production and perception

Communication is a joint performance between the speaker and the listener. If the speaker style- shifts in a certain manner, it is important to know whether it is salient for the listener and if variation in production reflects the variation in perception. In this series of accentedness studies, I have found variation in both production and perception as summarized in Section 6.1. I have excluded the friends setting from discussion in the production study completely, and although I retained it in the discussion of the perception study, I want to be cautious in interpreting the results pertaining to it as there was much variation in topic, audience, and flow of individual friends encounters.

In the remaining settings, the variation by setting in production partially matched the variation by setting in perception. My findings support Piller’s (2002) claims about the services setting. The services setting was most native-like in the speakers’ production of the vowels and the listeners’ assessment of accentedness. Speakers in this setting often employed formulaic expressions and high frequency words. It is also a very common, highly practiced situation with clear, defined roles for the parties involved. This relative lighter accentedness in production and perception would, presumably, make it easier to pass for a native speaker. This is supported by the speakers’ examples of their passing performances in service situations and other first encounters with strangers (Section 5.2); however, the difference in passing between the university and services settings in the experiment did not reach significance (Section 4.2.3).

The inter-relationship between the family and university settings in production and perception is not exact. Korean L1 participants were more native-like in their production in the university setting compared to the family setting while German L1 speakers’ production was not different between the two settings. In perception, on the other hand, the university setting was rated as more accented for females of both language groups (Experiment 2) or no significant difference at p<0.05 was found (Experiment 1). Purnell (2010) argues that the mapping of acoustic and perceptual cues is not exact, and Munro & Derwing (2015) also note that acoustic measures do not always correlate with perception ratings, so while the speakers may be

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signalling nativeness in some elements, if the listeners are focusing on a different set of elements, the signal may not be noticed. Additionally, I argued that topic and listener expectations about the speaker on a given topic may be an extralinguistic factor influencing accentedness perception.

Speaker sex was found to participate in a significant interaction with setting in Experiment 2, but neither its main effect nor their interaction reached significance in the production study. This suggests that the significant interaction may be the result of listener factors, that males and females may style-shift differently on features that I did not analyse (e.g., consonants), or the production study did not have enough participants and statistical power to detect a significant effect. A production experiment analysing more features with a larger number of speakers may help to clarify this.

6.2.4 Passing for a native speaker

Passing is an aspect of social behavior influenced by many factors. In this thesis I link it with accentedness in production and perception and assume that lighter accentedness in production and perception is correlated with successful passing for a native speaker. Based on the results of the production and perception studies and the speakers’ self-reports, I argue that the same speaker is more likely to have a successful passing performance in a short encounter with native- speaking strangers. This finding supports Piller’s (2002) claims that short service encounters are conducive to passing.

Piller’s (2002) claims about a facilitative effect of communication with friends may only be partially supported through re-interpreting the family setting as communication with friends. The friends setting was excluded from the production analysis because of the variation in topic and audience in the self-recordings, and it was not judged less accented compared to the university setting in my perception experiments. When the participants in Piller (2002) were mentioning communication with friends, they probably had a general effect of audience in mind rather than a more literal passing for a native speaker because passing can only refer to

communication with strangers when the real identity of the speaker is not known. By definition, one cannot pass for a NS to a friend who is familiar with the speaker’s background. I find some support for Piller’s claims if I re-interpret the family setting in my experiments as a ‘friends’

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setting because of a familiar environment, topic, and interviewer to my speakers. The production in the family setting was only significantly less native-like for Korean L1 speakers, and in perception, the results of my Experiment 2 suggest that it was only the female speakers who were judged significantly more accented in the university setting compared to the family setting. I argued that listener expectations play an important role in passing.

Listener expectation may also have an effect on passing in relation to visual cues. Experiment 3 investigated the effect of a non-linguistic variable, namely ethnicity, on perceived accentedness. Ethnicity and other visual factors, such as clothing, have often been linked to the phenomenon of passing. Pattinson (2010), as briefly discussed in Chapter 2, described what visual factors made it easier for British nationals to pass easier for a French person during WWII: stereotypical ‘French looks’ (eye and hair color, height, etc.) and clothing (no tweed jacket or plus-fours). Marx (2002) started to avoid running shoes, men’s jeans, and T-shirts in order to pass. Some of my Korean participants believed that their ethnicity prevented them from passing for a native speaker. In the accentedness experiment, however, the Korean speakers were rated similarly in audio only and audiovisual conditions. It is the German speakers that were rated significantly more accented in the audiovisual condition compared to audio only. However, this study explored the effect of ethnicity on accentedness, and its effect on passing for a native speaker may well be different.