276 Erik R. Thomas, Norman J. Lass, and Jeannine Carpenter
Americans. Finally, some differences from the results of Thomas and Reaser
(2004b) appeared. Unlike the earlier study, the glide of /o/ showed lower lev-
els of signi¿ cance than the nucleus and CPP (breathiness) reached signi¿ -
cance for only a few cells. The differences were probably due to the fact that
a smaller set of speakers was used for this study than for the earlier study, and
the speakers selected for Experiment A apparently had different voice char-
acteristics than the larger sample.
In general, the results from Experiment A show that vowel quality is a
key factor that listeners access to make ethnic identi¿ cations, but by no means
the only one. F0 seemed to play a role as well. The standard deviation of F0
did not seem to provide the most satisfactory measure of intonational differ-
ences, which are too complex to be captured by a one-dimensional metric.
The West Virginians clearly had more dif¿ culty with ethnic identi¿ cation
than the North Carolinians. Nevertheless, a question that is left unanswered is
whether they are really poorer at ethnic identi¿ cation as a whole or the nature
of the stimuli used in this experiment confounded them. This question and the
problem of capturing intonation are addressed in Experiment B.
- Experiment B
Experiment B was designed to test vowel quality and prosody against each
other directly. Experiment A, as well as the earlier experiments in Thomas
and Reaser (2004a, b), put more emphasis on vowel quality than on prosody,
and a design placing equal emphasis on these two factors was desirable. In
addition, the same listener groups as in Experiment A were used in order to
gain a more complete understanding of how they differ in accessing cues.
3.1 Methods
Four sentences from the corpus of recordings were chosen for Experiment B.
Two feature diagnostic vowels prominently—/o/ and /æ/, respectively—while
the other two do not include any vowel known to be diagnostic for African
American vs. European American identity:
Joe hoped he could go shop for a stove.
Pat sat on a hat, a cat, a bat, and a tack.
Buckwald’s trunk got ¿ lled up this month with junk.
We went to the shop to get some milk.