The Meaning of “Nasal Grunts” in the Necte Corpus. A Preliminary Perceptual Investigation.
Abstract
This paper reports a perceptual evaluation of the meanings conveyed by the acoustic
components of “nasal grunts” (Chlébowski and Ballier 2015), i.e., non-lexical
conversational sounds realised with a nasal feature (e.g. , , ).
This study follows the experimental investigation conducted by Chlébowski and Ballier
(2015) on the acoustic components of such sounds in the PVC project (Milroy et al. 1997),
which is part of the NECTE corpus (Allen et al. 2007). In accordance with current claims
in the literature, they ascribed meanings to these acoustic features, e.g. fall-rises express
that the “speaker implies something” (Wells 2006: 27), and verified their validity through
an analysis of the context surrounding the “nasal grunts”. Nonetheless, to avoid problems
of circularity and ad hoc categories, the present study includes a perceptual evaluation by
four participants. To verify the meanings ascribed to the features of “nasal grunts”, three
native speakers of American English were recorded in short casual conversations and three
perception tests were created using these recordings, with Praat software (Boersma and
Weenink 2009). The first two tests aim to check whether different acoustic features: 1) are
perceived as different when presented in pairs; 2) can be identified by the participants (as
falls or rises) in isolation. The last test aim to determine whether each feature bears the
same meaning: 1) in isolation, 2) in a given context, or 3) in scripted conversations likely
to trigger the meanings ascribed by Chlébowski and Ballier (2015). Results suggest that
acoustic components of “nasal grunts” in Geordie English do convey specific attitudinal
meanings, and raise the possibility of a perceptual hierarchy of those components.
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