
































Sociophonetic Investigation of Speech Perception among Students of Rivers State
University, Unkpolu, Port Harcourt

Ojonugwa Joseph

Abstract

This study was carried out to probe listeners’ use of sociophonetic details in speech perception.
The study was premised on the theory of model of social recognition. The population of the
study was students of Rivers State University of Science and Technology. Spoken materials were
used as instruments for data collection. Descriptive and interpretative tools were used for the
analysis of data collected. It was found that the combination of linguistic and dialectical tokens
exhibited by the speakers helped the listeners to identify the regional dialect of speakers. It was
revealed also that speakers index their ethnic background using phonetic variables. Also, the
study found that individuals’ stereotypical attitudes affect their judgments when perceiving a
speech. The study concludes that no natural human utterance offers linguistic information
without simultaneously indexing some social factors.

Keywords: Sociophonetic variation, Sociolinguistics, Speech perception, Social information and
Phonetic variables.

Introduction

The aversion of much of sociolinguistics to perception has been, to some extent, more apparent
than real. Many sociolinguistic studies, especially instrumental studies, have succeeded in
divorcing speech production from speech perception. However, perception issues may play a
hidden role in studies that ostensibly address production. Linguistic scholars have always
recognised that language varies systematically (i.e. non-randomly) across speakers, regions,
social groups and contexts of use (Foulkes, 1997, p.259). Studies of phonological development
have nevertheless generally treated most forms of variation simply as an inconvenience that
complicates the task of acquisition. According to Labov (1968, p.273), phonetic variation in
speech production is now known to correlate with a number of factors, including social
characteristics of the speaker and the formality of the situation. Research has proved that



speakers are not constant in the phonetic realization they produce but shift depending on the style
they construct in giving context.

The background above helps to demonstrate how individuals have (not necessarily
conscious) knowledge of sociolinguistic variables and that they can use this knowledge in
perception of speech. While the majority of linguistic theories do not attempt to account for
socially conditioned variation, socio-perceptual studies, together with sociolinguistic work in
production, provide evidence that sociolinguistic variation is not systematically ‘noise’ that is
flittered out during the processing and storing of speech events; the relationship between social
and linguistic information must be stored in the mind in such a way that it can be accessed during
speech perception. Thus, if linguistic theories aim to provide an accurate representation of
linguistic variation, they must account for the richness of social theory, the gradience (change) of
phonetic detail, and the probabilistic distribution of linguistic variables.

Furthermore, results from socio-perceptual studies also have implications for our
understanding of sound change and of language-based prejudices: if both a listener’s exceptions
regarding a speaker and the object in the environment can affect how their speech is perceived by
others, what does this say about sounds that are stored and associated in memory with the
speaker. It is crucial that we understand the relationship between how sounds are perceived and
what types of social judgements are made based on exposure to those sounds. Likewise, if we
hope to understand how sound change occurs, we must explore the extent to which stored
memories of sounds are affected by factors in the listener’s environment as well as the cognitive
processes underlying the perception of speech (Orager, p. 474).

Sociophonetic Variation: An Overview

In view of the diverse fields of reference of sociophonetics, it is pertinent to specify precisely
what is meant by sociophonetic variation. According to Foulkes (1997, pp. 409-410), it refers to
variable aspects of phonetic or phonological structure in which alternative forms correlate with
social factors. These factors include most obviously those social categories which have been
examined extensively by sociolinguists and dialectologists: speakers’ gender, age, ethnicity,
social class, group affiliations, geographical origin, and speaking style.

He further notes that, correlation may be with more than one social category
simultaneously, and variation may be observable within the repertoire of an individual speaker or
across groups of speakers. In case of sociophonetic variation, then, variable forms can be said to
index some or other social categories. Wells (1982, p.35) notes that ‘The relationship between
linguistic form and social category is arbitrary, and sociophonetic variation represents a pattern
of behavior learned by speakers through the experience of using language in social
interaction”.In other cases, though, indexicality may be of natural categories or phenomena and
linguistic variation may be non-arbitrary. For example, it is usually possible to distinguish the



voices of adult males, adult females, and children through the gross and direct acoustic
consequences of major differences in vocal tract dimensions.

Acoustic differences according to (Layer, 80; Layer & Trudgill, 79) can therefore be used
to index the natural biological categories of age and sex. Layer & Trudgill believe that, physical
variation between speakers may yield phonetic differences that index individuals. There may,
however, be no clear dividing line between learned and non-leaned behaviour or between
arbitrary and non-arbitrary phonetic variation (79). Foulkes (1997, p.411)supports this by saying
that, the socially-constructed category of gender overlaps considerably with the biological
category of sex, and the phonetic cues for gender (such as relatively high Fo which is the lowest
frequency at which a medium will freely oscillate) may be parasitic on phonetic differences
derived from biological differences. There is evidence that male-female differences emerge in
children’s speech will before the onset of puberty produce large differences in vocal tract
(Gunzburger& Keurs,1987, p. 87).

The phonetic variants observed in the speech of an individual are reflected in the way an
individual perceives sounds. For example, an individual’s regional origin can predict not only
how they pronounce sounds but also how they perceive them (Ladefoged and Broadbent,
1957,p.57; Willis, 1972, p.72; Fridland and Okamoto,2009,p.9). However, the link between an
individual’s production and perception is not straightforward. Some research suggests that,
speech perception may not always be affected when there is a change in production, even when
the change in production is a potentially long-term shift (Evans and Iverson,2007,p. 7). Some
groups of listeners appear to use phonetic cues during perception that they do not use in their
own production but that are used by other groups (Thomas,1992,p. 2). Thomas also found out
that, listeners of different ethnicities or social groups and from different regions used some of the
same phonetic cues in the preceding diphthong to identify whether a consonant was voiced or
voiceless (as in tide and tight). This provides evidence that individuals can have the ability to use
phonetic cues during perception even if they do not use those cues in production.

Perception Studies

Phonetic variation in speech production is now known to correlate with a number of factors,
including social characteristics of the speakers and the formality of the situation (Labov, 1968,
p.72). Although studies of perception are still largely assigned to the realms of experimental
phonetics or psychology, sociolinguists have been recognizing the importance of perception,
Erik, (2002, p.115). Several lines of experimental inquiry has been studied far less by
sociolinguists than has speech production. One reason according to Erik(2002, p.15), is that,
speech perception is daunting at first. Examining it requires careful attention to experimental
design, a considerable amount to preparation and in many cases, use of a speech synthesizer.
Even so, research on speech perception can be highly productive.



Speech perception is the process by which the sounds of language are heard, interpreted
and understood. The study of speech perception is closely linked to the fields of phonology and
phonetics in cognitive psychology and perceptive in psychology. Research in speech perception
seeks to understand how listeners recognize sound and use this information to understand spoken
language. Speech perception has application in building computer system that can recognize
speech, in improving speech recognition for hearing and language-impaired listeners, and in
foreign language teaching.

The process of perceiving speech begins at the level of the sound signal and the process
of audition. The speech sound signals always have a number of acoustic cues that are used in
speech perception for social category. The cues differentiate speech sounds belonging to
different phonetic categories, but it is not easy to identify what acoustic cues listeners are
sensitive to when perceiving a particular speech sound.

Production, Perception and Exposure

The phonetic variants observed in the speech of an individual are reflected in the way that the
individuals perceived sounds. Individuals’ regional origin can predict not only how they
pronounce sounds but also how they perceive them (Ladefoged and Broadbent, 1957, p.97;
Willis, 1972, p.247; Fridland and Okamoto, 2009, p.9). However, the link between an individual
and their perception is not entirely straightforward. Some research suggests that speech
perception may not always be affected when there is a change in production, even when the
change in production is a potentially long-term shift (Evans and Iverson,2007, p. 3820).
According to Drager qtd. in Thomas. In regard to the effect of diphthong qualities according to
Thomas (1992, p.20), the responses during the perception experiment were similar despite only
one of the subject groups in the production demonstrating much stronger patterns relating the
phonetic cues of the diphthong to the voicing on the constant. This provides evidence that
individuals can have the ability to use phonetic cues during perception even if they do not use
those cues in production.

Similarly, in perception study, sounds undergo a merger (Janson and Schulman, 1983, p.
334). They further stressed that listeners who maintain a distinction were not always accurate at
identifying tokens, even when they were produced by someone who also maintained a distinction.
Hay et al. (2006, p.459) conducted an experiment in New Zealand which also investigated the
perception of sounds that were involved in an ongoing merger. In contrast to Janson and
Schulman’s 1983 results, Hay et al. (2006, p.20) found that listeners were highly accurate at
identifying distinct tokens, even if they did not maintain a distinction in their own speech.

According to Drager (2010,p.475), exposure to other dialect affects both speech
processing and ability of listener to identify social characteristics of the speaker. Clopper and
Pisoni (4) found that, previous exposure of a dialect affects accuracy at identifying the regional
origin of the speaker. In phoneme and word identification tasks, even relatively small amounts of



exposure to speech can cause listeners to adjust their categorization (Norris, 2003,p. 231).
However, listeners only appear to be affected by such exposure if the variable is interpretable as
an idiolectal (speaker-specific) feature rather than a dialectal (generalizable) feature (Kraljic et
al., 2008, p.58). While differing degrees of exposure to other dialects can affect how sounds are
perceived, previous exposure affects perception differently for different types of task depending
on whether they require short-term or long-term storage (Summer and Samuel,2009, p. 489).

Attachment of Social Information of a Speaker in Speech Recognition and Perception

There is ample research which provides evidence that social information (both personality trait
as well as broad social categories) can be extracted from auditory input in fairly consistent
(though not necessarily accurate) ways. Researchers have investigated the degree to which
listeners can identify a speaker`s ethnicity (Buck 1968, p.28); (Tuckers and Lambert, 1969,p.
469), (Purnell et al., 1999, p. 20), gender and sexuality (Munson and Babel, 2017), regional
dialect origin (Bush, 67; Preston, 99; Williams regional dialect origin (Lambert et al. 69,
(Addington, 1968, p. 498), Preston 99; (Bayard, 2000, p. 220). in an experiment examining
listeners’ perception of the speakers of the speakers origin, Clopper and Pisoni, 20) found that
although listeners were not especially accurate when identifying the actual regional origin of the
speaker, they responded in ways consistent with one another and appeared to be using a small set
of phonetic cues when assigning a region. In speech perception experiment where listeners were
asked to identify the speaker’s ethnicity, accuracy was inversely proportional to the number of
‘atypical’ variants: variants considered atypical for speakers of that ethnicity.

Foulkes (1997, p.10) conducted an experiment in Tyneside where they played tokens of
children’s speech to adults. They found that when identifying the sex of a child, listeners
appeared to use a number of different acoustic cues, including whether or not the child produced
a laryngealised voiceless stop, a variant associated with males in the region. When listeners from
other regions were asked to complete the same task, they did not display the same sensitivity to
the realisation of the stops. This provides evidence that individuals are sensitive to socially
conditioned variation when perceiving speech. The ability to associate some perceived
characteristic of the speaker with the phonetic variants that speaker tends to produce appears to
be highly productive. There is some evidence that even a small amount of exposure to phonetic
patterns distributed over novel, previously unencountered groups can affect listener’s
categorization of a speaker into one of the groups (Docherty et al,2008, p. 8).

More experiments along these lines are necessary; particularly needed are ones which
control the patterning of phonetic variables. While the design of such an experiment becomes
increasingly complex as the number of variables increases, such investigations are promising
ways to shed light on how a listener’s perception of another’s persona is formed.

Social Information and Speech Perception



The relationship between phonetic and social information during speech perception is not
unidirectional; the phonetic variants perceived can affect what characteristics are attributed to a
speaker, and the characteristics attributed to the speaker can influence how sounds are perceived.
Research has it that, within the speech of a single individual, the focus of a periodic energy of the
alveolar fricative /s/ is higher than for the patatal fricative /S/. The acoustic boundary between /S/
and /s/ according to Drager (2010, p.476) depends in part on vocal size and therefore tends to be
higher for females than males. What this mean is that, it is possible for a token of /S/ produced
by a male to have its turbulence focused in a similar frequency range as a female’s token of /s/.

There is evidence that the perception of phonetic variables can also be affected by other
social characteristics attributed to the speaker, including dialect area, ethnicity, socio-economic
status, etc. (Drager, 2010, p.11). Using photographs to manipulate the perceived socio-economic
status and age of speakers in a perception experiment, Hay et al (6) found that participants’
accuracy at identifying distract tokens of the diphthongs depended on the social characteristics of
the person in the photograph.

In addition to effects from social information attributed to the speaker, there is evidence
that the dialect of an experimenter can affect performance on perception tasks (Hay et
al,2006,p.6). In a study on the perception of tones of the speaker, Brunelle and Jannedy,
(2007,p.7) found an interaction between the dialect of the experimenter, the dialect of the
participant, and the tone. Similarly, Hay et al (2006,p.6) reported an interaction between the
dialect of the experimenter and the participant’s degree of merger. The work discussed above
helps exemplify just how malleable speech perception can be. Depending on what information is
present at the time of perception, listeners can shift in how they perceive sounds. While any
model of speech perception is bound to be incomplete, that social information can affect how
sounds are perceived suggests that it should ideally be included.

Theoretical Framework

This work adopts the Exemplar-based model of social recognition. This theory assumes that
knowledge of linguistic structure is built up by representing memory the totality of linguistic
experiences that an individual has. This theory was propounded by Robert Nofofsky in 1986.
The theory is a proposal concerning the way humans categorize objects and ideas in psychology.
It argues that individuals make category judgments by comparing new stimuli with instances
already stored in memory. The instance stored in memory is the “exemplar”. The new stimulus is
assigned to a category based on the greatest number of similarities it holds with exemplars in that
category. For example, the model proposes that people create the “bird” category by maintaining
in their memory a collection of all the birds they have experienced: sparrows, robins, ostriches,
penguins, etc. If a new stimulus is similar enough to some of these stored examples, the person
categorizes the stimulus in the “bird” category. Various versions of the exemplar theory have led
to a simplification of thought concerning concept learning, because they suggest that people use
already-encountered memories to determine categorization, rather than creating an additional



abstract summary of social recognition. This recognition may therefore include a potentially vast
set of detailed sociophonetic traces based upon the tokens an individual has heard, and a parallel
set of traces bearing articulatory information about tokens that the individual has uttered. It will
be apparent from the foregoing that sociophonetic data have been collected to address a wide
range of theoretical issues, reflecting the range of disciplines that have contributed to the
development of sociophonetic as a field of linguistics.

Methodology

The methods used in speech perception research can be roughly divided into three groups:
behavioural, computational, and more recently, neuro-physiological methods. The researcher has
adopted the behavioural method to simulate how speech may be processed by the participant to
produce the behaviours that are observed. The method experiments are based on an active role of
the participants, i.e. subjects are presented with stimuli and asked to make conscious decisions
about them. This type of experiment helps to provide a basic description of how listeners
perceive and categorize speech sound. With the aid of technological assisted recording tools,
there were collected a combination of spoken materials (speeches) to reflect the natural
repertoire on how the elements use language to construct their social categories. Based on the
data collected, the descriptive and interpretative technique to analyse the data. The data collected
were analyzed using careful auditory analysis in relation to the research questions, to determine
how linguistic variants can index social meaning.

Data Presentation and Analysis

Having looked at the different manifestations and interpretations of speech perception within the
scope of sociophonetics, this section deals with the presentation and analysis of data collected.

Listeners Identify Regional Dialect of the Speaker using his Speech

Within this category, the researcher introduced an event in which recordings of speakers of
different dialects are played to the listeners/subjects in which listeners were asked to identify the
dialect of voices speaking English, as to whether the speaker was of Ekpeye, Ikwerre or Ogoni
ethnic nationality. The stimuli, which included nonsense words, real words, and sentences were
played either in original form, low-pass filtered, high-pass filtered, or center-clipped. The
filtering provided some indication about whether listeners could base their identifications on
prosodic factors. As it turned out, listeners were generally able to identify the dialect of the
filtered stimuli 95% or more of the time.

Another experiment involving identification of the dialect of speakers was carried out in
a more compound manner. The researcher played to listeners four variants of //, as in caught,
uttered by speakers of different dialects. The researcher asked the listeners to rate the variants on



scale of most – to – least Ikwerre-sounding and most-to-least Ogoni-sounding and then to guess
where each speaker came from. The aim was to test reactions to the raised monophthongal
variant // that occurs around the diatectal sound, and the result showed that it ranked high on
the Ikwerreness scale and low on the Ogoniness scale.

Listeners use Speakers’ Utterance to Ascertain Ethnicity

Perception experiments testing the ability of listeners to identify the ethnicity of speakers have
involved playing recordings of different ethnic groups in the study area, generally either field
recording or tapes of speakers reading a story, to subjects who were asked to identify the
speakers’ ethnicity. Using this method, it was found that, listeners could identify the ethnicity of
speakers much of the time or even nearly all the time.

The researcher conducted another investigation on whether the speakers’ intonation could
serve as an element for ethnic identification. Four corps members’ belongings to the two regions
submitted their speeches in a way to initiate conversational speech. Listeners were therefore
asked to focus attention on intonation. The results showed that sentences with more diagnostic
into national cues were identified more accurately than those with fewer cues.

Taken together, these studies have shown that, under certain circumstances, listeners are
capable of accessing a wide variety of cues to determine whether a speaker speaking or the
speaker whose voice was heard belonged to a certain ethnic nationality. While all these studies
have demonstrated that listeners can often identify the ethnicity of a speaker, the researcher`s
major limitation is that he could not determine what features listeners rely on to make the
identifications. Nevertheless, it is not yet clear which ones listeners use in real-life situations or
which ones are most needed or important.

Stereotypical Attitudes of the Listeners Influence the Perception of Sounds

This question examined how stereotypes can affect listeners’ perception of speech. In examining
this, the researcher arranged the listeners in away to hear the speech/sound and watch a video of
a speaker altering a different sound tend to perceive the sound that they “lip-read” from the video,
and not necessarily the sound they hear. The results showed that listeners altered their perception
of a speaker’s speech when there exists any sign of stereotypes. In another development, listeners
simultaneously watched a video of a male or a female uttering /s/ /S/ vowel sounds. The results
showed that listeners altered their perception of the fricative depending on the sex of the speaker
that they saw altering such sounds, shifting the /s/-/S/ boundary to lower frequencies for male
faces and to higher frequencies for female faces. The results of this exercise showed that speech
perception is always influenced not just by the physical attributes of sounds but also by gender
stereotypes.

Discussion of Findings



The result of the dialectal tokens in the speech stream of the speaker indexing his social category
shows that the combination of linguistic and dialectal tokens exhibits by the speakers helps the
listeners to identify the ethnicity of speakers much of the time or even nearly all the time. This
finding agrees with the work of Drager (2007, p. 11) which states that, there is evidence that the
perception of phonetic variables can also be affected by other social characteristics- attributed by
the speaker, including dialect area, ethnicity, socio-economic status etc.

The result on whether the speech of the speakers shows the possible ethnic nationality to
which they belong reveals that speakers index their ethnic background using phonetic variables
as a reflection of both of their personal character traits and their origination with a particular
ethnic nationality. This finding agrees with the work of Foulkes (1997, p.10) which states that
individuals are sensitive to socially conditioned variation when perceiving speech.

The result shows that judgments of the listeners about speakers when perceiving their
speech depend on the individuals stereotypical attitudes or beliefs about the speakers since
listeners also map phonological patterning not only against the meaning of the word in question
but also against other dimensions of that particular tokens such as the region and the dialect of
the speakers. This finding agrees with Labov (1968,p.473) which found that phonetic variation in
speech is now known to correlate with a number of factors, including social characteristics of the
speaker and the formality of the situation.

Conclusion

In sum, speech perception experiments provide a means of investigating research questions
concerned with language change, linguistic variation, and the storage of linguistic variables in
memory, questions that could not be addressed as completely by focusing solely on speech
production. The better we understand how sounds are stored in memory and the more we
uncover about the nature of the indexation between the mental representations of linguistic
variations and social information, the better we will be able to interpret sociolinguistic patterns in
speech production and the more complete our understanding of sounds change and stereotype
formation will be.

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