Perceptions of /a/ fronting Across Two Michigan Dialects 229Some respondents chose to have the experiment run at their own house, while
others chose a public library, quiet study room or a vacant conference room.
3.1 The Protocol
During testing, a respondent was asked to sit quietly and to face the computer,
which was placed in a well-lighted location within easy reach and view. Instruc-
tions were presented on the computer screen to lead the respondent through all
aspects of testing, and to pace the test sessions. The audio capability of modern
portable computers is close in quality to that of older speech laboratory worksta-
tions. Speech stimuli were presented to respondents binaurally, at a comfortable
listening level, via closed, À at-response headphones (Koss R80) that provided
both high quality audio reproduction and also attenuation of any background
noise. The respondent’s decisions about stimuli were reported to the computer
by means of button presses directed through the built-in touchpad.
Test results were written to a database in real time. The database was later
merged dynamically with demographic information about the respondent into
a data ¿ le that could be cross-tabulated to obtain information about individual
respondents and/or about groups of respondents.
- The present study
4.1 Talkers and listeners
As noted previously, the present study asked whether listeners would inter-
pret vowel tokens that might by subject to /a/ fronting differently, depending
on whether those tokens occurred in sentences spoken by a talker from the
Detroit area of Southeastern Lower Michigan where NCCS is active, or by a
talker from the Ishpeming area of the Upper Peninsula where NCCS effects
are minimal. A second important variable in the study concerned the socio-
phonetic backgrounds of the listeners themselves. The study respondents
were selected to include one subgroup from Lower Michigan who had had
extensive listening experience with NCCS, and a second subgroup from the
Upper Peninsula who had had much more limited experience.
4.2 Respondents
The respondents were 18 young adults (ages 19—34) of European-American
descent. Nine of them (4 men, 5 women) were recruited from the Detroit area