| The purpose of this study was to determine whether listeners experienced in processing African American English (AAE) use different cues than Mainstream American English (MAE) listeners to perceive final voiced and voiceless stop consonants produced by speakers of AAE. In this study, 12 experienced AAE listeners and 12 listeners with limited AAE experience were presented with words containing open syllables (CV) and closed syllables (CVC+) where C+ = /b, d, g, p, t, k/. The words were presented in two medial sentence contexts; target word followed by a vowel in "Say__ again" or target word followed by the voiceless fricative consonant /f/ in "Say__ for me". Two moderate-to-heavy AAE speakers produced the corpus of 60 words. Participants selected one of seven response alternatives (b, d, g, p, t, k, v). The v represents an open syllable (i.e., no final consonant). The listeners' responses were scored as correct if the intended consonants (underlying forms) were selected. The voicing and place distinctions perceived by AAE users to distinguish final stop consonants were established by comparing productions identified correctly by AAE listeners but incorrectly by MAE listeners, incorrectly by both sets of listeners, and correctly by both sets of listeners. |
