Linguistic Change: Cognitive

and Cultural Factors

Chapter 2: Natural Misunderstanding

Table of contents 1. Introduction

2. Collection of natural misunderstandings

3. Modes of Correction

4. Frequency of missunderstandings

5. The role of sound change

6. Linguistic focus

7. The effect of mergers 7.1 Low back merger

7.2 Pin/pen merger

7.3 Mergers before /l/

8. Chain shifts 8.1 Northern Cities Shift (NCS)

8.2 Southern and Canadian Shift

9. Philadelphia Sound Changes

10. r-less vs r-full Dialects

11. General North American Sound Changes

12. Overview

13. Personal view

1.Introduction

Are linguistic changes major contributors to misunderstanding?

Speech communities memorize tokens with related information to gender, age, social class and personal identity of talkers.

These memories are preserved as the basis of speech perception and production.

Drastic shifts in the phonetic version of a phoneme overlap the positions of one to three adjacent phonemes.

2.Collection of Natural Misunderstandings

Data was collected by pads of printed forms shown in figure 2.1

CDC stands for Cross Dialectal Comprehension

The Misunderstandings took place in everyday life and were

collected by Lunguists and linguistic students

3.Modes of Correction (1)

indicates what the listener understood

Misunderstandings were corrected by Mode:

A - Before the expression was over, in less than a second

B - Speakers response to look or query, within seconds

3.Modes of Correction (2)

C - Reasoning from further statements, in ten seconds to several minutes

D - Random events afterwards, some time later or after many days

E - No correction at all, observed by a third person

4.Frequency of misunderstandings (1)

The more evidence there is, the higher is the chance to detect and correct

the misconception

The detection becomes more dificult with increasing delay of the correction

The table 2.1 shows how misunderstandings were detected in a period of

14 years

4.Frequency of misunderstandings (2)

The table 2.2 shows how many misunderstandings were detected in a

certain year

In the period 1986-1988 were 544 observations recorded. 27% of that were

dialect motivated.

5.The role of sound change

Dialect motivated miscommunications (around 25%) are mostly due to

sound changes in progress

In table 2.2 the main observers were linguists with good phonetic training, it

shows how many natural misunderstandings are dialect motivated

6.Linguistic focus (1)

Phonology is the most promoting and Pragmatics the most inhibiting factor

to natural misunderstandings.

This means that Pragmatics is the factor that let record the

misunderstanding while Phonology takes the counter part

6.Linguistic focus (2)

Pragmatics produces comic effects while Phonetics shows minimal

phonetic mismatches

The folowing shows different examples in this respect

A – Variation in the syntactic analysis of homonymous sequences

B – Loss or insertion of a segment

6.Linguistic focus (3)

C – Wrong identification of a single segment

D – Wrong identification of two segments in a word

E – Error at the word level

6.Linguistic focus (4)

F – Re-analysis of word sequences with phonological adjustments

Minimal phonetic mismatches

Reasons are rapid speech or syntactic re-analysis

Linguistic focus (5)

Linguistic focus (6)

This shows that dialect motivated

examples are concentrated in the one

segment area while in the categories

homonyms, segment lost and re-analisys

they are almost missing

7.The effect of mergers (1)

7.1 Low back merger

Merger belong to dialect motivated misunderstandings

Dominant in Eastern New England, Canada, Western Pensylvania

and the West.

Examples

7.The effect of mergers (2)

7.2 Pin/pen merger

Loss of the distinction between /i/ and /e/ before nasals

Occurs in the South, South-Midland, African-American speakers

Examples

7.The effect of mergers (3)

7.3 Mergers before /l/

Complete mergers of /il ~iyl/ and /ul/ ~ /uwl/

Occurs in very different regions

Examples:

Canadian „bowl“ heard as „ball“ by Mid-Atlantic hearers

„called“ heard as „cold“ in the reverse case

8.Chain Shifts (1)

8.1 Northern Cities Shift (NCS)

Chain shifts reverse vowel systems

They occur in North American English

The NCS has many different misunderstanding forms

„Kodak“ misheard as „Coding“

„costumes“ misheard as „casting“

The reversed version as in „sacks“ misheard as „socks“

Confusion of /e/ and /o/ as in „pets“ and „pots“

Other examples like „trecks“ misheard as „trucks“ or „Hicks“ as „Hex“

8.Chain Shifts (2)

8.2 Southern and Canadian Shift

Southern Shift Examples:

„Right“ misheard as „rot“ or „rat“

„Blond joke“ heard as „blind joke“

„space suit“ heard as „spice suit“

mishearing „Glenn“ as „grand“

Canadian Shift example:

9.Philadelphia Sound Changes (1)

Back Vowel Shift before /r/

Example

Fronting and raising of /aw/

Confusing „frown“ as „fan“

Other Example

Other Sound Changes like „eight“ misheard as „eat“ or „Snake“ as „sneak“

9.Philadelphia Sound Changes (2)

Lowering of /e/

Example

Unrounded glide /l/ is often heard as rounded glide

Examples „go“ heard as „goal“

„omissions“ as „all missions“

10.r-less vs r-full Dialects

Main source of r-lessness is from British, New York City and African-

American speakers.

Examples

„Carl“ heard as „call“

„floor“ as „flaw“

The insertion of a „r“ is also frequent

Examples

A New Yorker heard a Mid-Atlantic „autistic“ as „artistic“ and „Aubie´s“

as „Arbie´s“

11.General North American Sound Changes

„Ian“ misheard as „Ann“

„pens“ instead of „pans“

„bed“ instead of „bad“

„scooter“ misheard as „skeeter“

„youth“ as „yeast“

„Ocean City“ heard as „Nation´s City“

„phones“ as „films“

12.Overview

Most of the misunderstandings crossed dialect boundaries

The most errors were corrected after few seconds due to context

Around 25% of the misconceptions are due to dialect

Pragmatics helps to detect the errors, phonology makes it more difficult

Misunderstandings result to comic apearences but have only minimal phonetic differences

It is an illusion that North American English speakers have no problems in understanding other North American dialects of English

It is hard to record data, because only if the hearer or a bystander realizes that there was a misunderstanding it can be recorded.

Outlook: In the future we could improve the comprehension between dialects of a given language, if we know more about the reasons that led to a misunderstanding or about the phonetic differences.

13. Personal view

I liked this article, because I myself misunderstand many things especially in english utterances and I wanted to know what was behind it.

I was surprised that even the most comic sentences have only minimal phonetic differences. That only one to three phonemes lead to a misunderstanding and can change the sense completely.

Even with the best knowledge in a language you won´t be able to understand everything the first time you hear it. It depends mostly on the speaker´s dialect of this language.