Production mechanisms of ejectives in German, English and Georgian

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Adrian Paul Simpson
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: since 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 411345078

In the project „The production mechanisms of ejectives in German, English and Georgian“ we have built a multi-lingual, multi-channel corpus with acoustic and articulatory information about phonemic, epiphenomenal, and sociophonetic ejectives. As part of the project continuation we will enrich this corpus by acquiring additional recordings of male speakers and L2 speakers in order to investigate the impact of biological sex and gender identity, as well as foreign language proficiency on the phonetic characteristics of ejective productions. The acoustic and articulatory features of ejective productions of Georgian learners of German and German learners of English are investigated. We aim to investigate whether Georgian learners of German produce epiphenomenal ejectives, especially when shadowing German native speakers, and also whether German learners of English produce sociophonetic ejectives depending on their individual learning process and their target variety of English. Expanding the data acquisition from female to male speakers allows a detailed analysis of ejective productions under the aspect of gender role. Another goal of the project continuation is to investigate the impact of information-theoretic factors on ejective production. It is well known that frequency and predictability effects can affect the acoustic markedness of phonetic structures. Because ejectives are known to display increased acoustic markedness, we expect them to appear more frequently in contexts that are difficult to predict. This line of research can also provide a new perspective on foreign language learning. Following the hypothesis that L1 speakers share a common language model, L2 proficiency can be defined as the level of familiarity with that language model. Therefore, information-theoretic factors can be used to explain the variability of ejective production in L2 speech.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants