Hair Salons + Speech Perception

The oddest thing happened the other day. (Linguistically, that is.) I was at the hairdresser. I’ve been going to the same person for a while now, but she works at a busy salon with lots of stylists in training who often do the pre-cut washing. So, in other words, I was getting my hair washed by someone new. As she started the wash she asked me, in a Scottish accent:

“Is that your natural [kəɾᵊl]?”

And then this inexplicable thing that happened: I heard that word as color. So I said “Yes, it is” because I don’t dye my hair. Then she said something like, “Oh, you’re so lucky, I’ve spent hours trying to get mine to look like that.” And this was confusing, because I have boring black hair. So then I realized, of course, she’s talking about my hair’s curl — just like every single stylist before her, for the last two decades, has always done! (And no, I’m not 20 years old; my hair went curly after puberty.)

So this is what makes this moment of misperception so baffling: I always get comments on my curls and I never get comments on my color. In theory, I could’ve predicted that she’d ask me about my curly hair before even saying anything at all! And prefacing the word with the word “natural” should’ve been absolutely foolproof for accurate perception, because I would bet that 99% of the occurrences of the word “natural” that I’ve encountered while in a hair salon have been collocated with the word “curl.”

Add to this the fact that I’m a linguist, and a sociophonetician at that, and that accents are my object of study, and that I’ve been living in Scotland for over two years now, and so I’ve heard this before (girl, world, swirl), and… This is all very embarrassing.

Linguistically, here’s what I find surprising. First, there’s all sorts of evidence from sentence processing that we do predict a word’s occurrence based on probabilities calculated on the fly from the words that precede it. Given two equally semantically probable options (as in this case), it’s not a far stretch to imagine than an individual’s personal experience would weight these probabilities further (e.g., me versus someone with straight hair who dyes it regularly). Second, I think it’s interesting that syllabicity apparently trumped phone identity. The /l/ precedes the /r/ in the word color but follows it in the word curl. But I was apparently happy to accept this swapping of liquid position because of the strength my mental representation of color as having two syllables and curl only having one. (Perhaps the fact of the /r/ being realized as a tap has something to do with it, but I’m not sure what.)

My analysis: The plural marking on count or mass nouns is often dropped in technical use, like fashionistas who say that like a certain kind of pant or cattle ranchers who talk about a lot of cow. While it may be relatively more colloquial to talk about someone’s curl, I’d still personally refer instead to someone’s curls (or curly hair). My own experience, both in and out of salons, is probably more with the sentence “Are those your natural curls?” than “Is that your natural curl?”. I think that if the initial verb had prepared me for a plural noun then there’s no way I would’ve misperceived the word as color, because my hair has only one color. Similarly, if there had been a final [s] after the word, it would’ve disambiguated the words as well. (And perhaps if I were greying a bit then this misunderstanding wouldn’t have happened, either.)

Another point in my defense, I mean, by way of explanation, is that hair salons are noisy. There was a blow-dryer going at the time just a few feet away, and there’s lots of research that shows that perception is degraded in noisy environments. (So there!)

Socially, what this experience did was reaffirm how relatively low my frequency of interaction is with people whose accents are ‘Scottish enough’ to have pronunciations such as [kəɾᵊl] for curl. I’ve talked about this before, but this was a strong reminder of that (unfortunate) fact.

The haircut that followed the aforementioned event.

P.S. I’m happy to receive corrections to my ad hoc transcription attempt (because hey, obviously I can’t hear as well as I’d like to think I can)! Since I have a lack of ‘authentic’ data (and please just accept those scare quotes and don’t get me started on ‘authenticity’), here’s a clip of a voice actor/trainer discussing the Scottish pronunciation of the word girl.

P.P.S. Throughout this post I’ve been self-conscious of my spelling choice for the word color. On Twitter, I always follow Lynne Murphy‘s practice of using a parenthesis around the variant letter, e.g., colo(u)r. But here, I thought that would be distracting. however, I do recogni(s/z)e the irony in using US spelling on a blog called vocalised…

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A Scot in Scottsdale

On BBC Radio Scotland’s “Sport Nation” programme today there was an interview with Martin Laird, the “Scot in Scottsdale,” a Glasweigan golfer who lives in Arizona. He was being interviewed because of his recent success at the World Golf Championships in Scottsdale. Immediately following the radio interview the hosts were making fun of his accent, one saying, “You know when I met Martin when he was a wee boy he didn’t have that accent! <laughs>”

I should say up front that I know absolutely nothing about golf and only just heard about his guy today. Laird is 29 years old and moved to the U.S. when he was 17. According to Wikipedia he went to university in Colorado, so his ambient variety for the past 12 years has been all Western U.S. English. Colorado and Arizona are relatively understudied with respect to English variation, though at one point in my life I cobbled this page together, and I hope to collect more data in Arizona later this year. But the one thing we do know for sure is that Colorado and Arizona are part of the wider geographical region that features the Low Back Vowel Merger, i.e., we say the vowels in cot and caught identically (for more on that, check out the the Atlas of North American English). In any case, that particular feature isn’t going to help much in this instance because those vowels are also merged in Scottish English (though the position of the merged vowel is different, so I suppose you could look at that).

Anyway, as an Arizonan in Scotland, I was clearly intrigued by Martin Laird’s accent. At least some of his vowels were noticeably Scottish to my ears, and the intonation patterns I’ve come to associate with Glasgow were also there. But the commentators were also right in that his accent wasn’t nearly as strong as that of, say, Rob Lawson, the Glasweigan sociolinguist who spent a good portion of his PhD studies in Tucson (and who has a good blog you should check out, too). Okay, maybe we don’t need a linguist to tell us that the longer a person stays in a place the more likely it is to affect them. But the extent to which an person can and will change their accent as an adult is an intriguing and active area of current research, and there are still a number of open research questions. (If you’re interested in the details, the go-to research on these issues is undoubtably Gillian Sankoff)

So, being who I am and listening to Laird on the radio made me think of running a fun little study comparing expats. Would a Glasweigan who spends 12 years in Colorado/Arizona sound like an Arizona who spends 12 years in Glasgow? (Obviously we’re need to find our Arizonan, since I’m not a viable candidate, not only because I’m not in Glasgow but because what you’d want would be someone who spends as much of their time around Scots as Laird spends around Arizonans, and as a university lecturer I spend more time talking to students from England and colleagues from the U.S. than I do talking to Scots. Not to mention that I just got here.) But say you could control for things like nativeness of network and level of network interaction, it would be cool to see what features change more than others, and specifically how the features of the two expats’ resultant varieties compare with one another. I think Jennifer Nycz, who studied Canadians in New York, likely has some smart thoughts about New Yorkers in Canada. The comment section is yours, Jen!

That radio interview with Laird was quite brief. I wish it’d gone on longer, because it would’ve been interesting to see if he might have gradually shifted back to sounding more Glasweigan the longer he talked to the BBC Radio Scotland interviewers. Near the end of the interview, for example, they asked him a question and he responded with “Aye” and it made me immediately wonder how often he says “Aye” in his daily life. Maybe a lot, for all I know; he’s in a particularly interesting position as a golfer, where Scottishness surely has high social capital. Of course, now I’m wondering about getting ahold of BBC archival recordings to track down earlier interviews with him… which of course I don’t have time for right now! This is why I blog, people. Someone should steal this idea and let me know how the research goes.

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“So, do you sound British yet?”

Everyone’s favorite joke when I went home for Christmas was to ask me if I was picking up a British accent, “yet.”  It’s a weird joke to me, because it operates on the assumption that acquiring a non-native accent is even possible in adulthood, when the idea behind this assumption is actually one of those big, unanswered, empirical questions in sociolinguistics.  It’s really complicated, involving matters of personal identity and language attitudes of the listeners as well as psychological constraints and all the rest — basically anything that matters about linguistic production that you can think of.  The question/joke also operates under the assumption that there’s one target accent, this so-called “British accent,” which anyone who knows about English in England knows is a fallacy to an even greater extent than the fallacy of there being one “American accent.”  By “greater extent” what I mean is that the range of linguistic variation is greater from town to town, person to person, and so mutual intelligibility between any two given Brits is relatively lower than between two given Americans.  This is not news.  (What’s more is how rarely people actually identify as “British” — I’m not going to get into that quagmire, here!)

English flags on the English/Scottish border

Oxford is, as others have already pointed out in comments on this blog, just about the worst place to acquire something like a “British accent,” even if I could, and even if such a thing existed.  The town is not exactly quaint Oxfordshire.  There are of course a lot of “townies” and other locals around, but because of where I live (in college) and my job (with the university) I spend most of my time talking with international students/scholars and “British” folk who are from various parts of the UK, none of them Oxfordshire.  So I end up at dinners with a table full of people from different parts of southern England (not even northern England, which is more linguistically distinct, and not even to mention Scotland or Ireland), and debates will ensue between them about the most common term for this or that.  None of this would exactly help with my so-called acquisition of so-called British English.

"British English" is not the only thing in Oxford

That said, there’s a reason I’m writing this blog post…

I wrote a few months ago about the accent of the voice that we hear in our heads.  People who read and commented on that post or to me, about the post, focused more on the whilst/while alternation than on the questions I was most interested in — the sound or grammar of the voice that we hear either when we’re reading silently to ourselves, as I was doing with my student papers in that blogpost, or when we’re `talking’ silently to ourselves.  It’s this latter one that caught me off-guard this morning.  I should start by saying that this wasn’t anything to do with accent.  At least, not in terms of segmental variation, but it could be that my `inner voice’ did have a bit of British intonation (obviously this kind of thing is really hard to test…!)  Anyway, some background: about a month ago I was walking around downtown Oxford when I realized that my mobile/cell phone was missing.  I don’t know if I’d dropped it or if it’d been stolen.  After much wrangling and various visits to the store and various phone calls to the phone company, I got a replacement phone, for free, just like my old one, and with the same number, but of course with none of the information in it, like people’s phone numbers, etc.  I’ve had this phone about a week now, at the most, during which I’ve finally reentered these numbers and other information.  So I get to work this morning and I reach into my pocket and it’s not there (because it was in my purse) and I say to myself:

Damn, don’t tell me my phone’s been nicked again!

What’s weird about this is that not only have I never in my life used the word nicked, either through verbal articulation or writing, I also haven’t been around too many people who’ve had the chance to use it, at least not that I’m aware of.  In other words, I don’t remember anyone I know talking to me about having something nicked.  One of my friends here had her purse stolen at a restaurant, but she’s American — the purse was quite definitely stolen, not nicked! Sure, it’s one of those Britishims that Americans know and use to stereotype Brits, but it’s one thing to know what Those Other People do, and quite another thing to curse at oneself in one’s own head, using a kind of mixed linguistic style.  So, no, my dear friends-and-family-back-home, I’m not acquiring a “British accent,” but I am acquiring something.  As a sociolinguist, I feel like I should have a much better model of what this something is.

But most of the time, it just takes me by surprise.

Funny signs can also take one by surprise...

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while/whilst

… Whilst Schneider’s work suggests various explanations for this phenomenon …

… Reggae music and its use of Dread Talk whilst fighting the system it became a part of …

… But if you omit the second PP whilst altering the first PP, it is unlikely that the second would be understood …

… If this is indeed true, then it means that whilst there is such a thing as an ‘objective’ way of syllabifying a sound stream, it may differ from the intended syllabification …

I’ve been living in the UK now for about four months (minus several weeks over the holidays), and so perceiving and accommodating to various varieties of UK English is becoming increasingly routine and comfortable.  It’s to the point where I’m almost just as likely to misunderstand a fellow American as I am a Brit (at least, in Oxford), and sometimes I can go for a minute or so listening to someone without it registering what their accent is.  Or, indeed, American accents are sounding `funnier’ to me, sometimes, than British ones, at least when I overhear them in public.  But despite all that, there’s one US/UK difference that always makes me pause every time I see it written: the use of whilst where I would use while.

The examples above are taken from some of the tutorial essays my students have been writing.  All of my undergraduate students are British (incidentally, none of my graduate students are native English speakers, but that difference is par for the course).  Of course their writing has other British features, but every time I see whilst I just find it incredibly distracting.  I have a theory as to why, so tell me what you think.

Whilst is one of those Britishisms that I learned through reading, rather than talking to real Brits.  In fact, I couldn’t tell you whether or not I’d ever actually heard it pronounced before I moved to the UK.  (I’m sure I did, of course, I just never noticed.)  Anyway, since I learned it from reading, I’ve always pronounced it in my head with an [ɪ] vowel, as in bit.  This is wrong; it’s pronounced with the same vowel as in while, but I didn’t learn/realize that until quite recently.  So, it’s like someone pronouncing the ‘b’ in subtle, only to find out later (one hopes!) that the ‘b’ is silent.  I don’t know if such people pause when they read the word subtle, after learning about the ‘b’, but I definitely pause every time I see whilst, and I think to myself:

… blah blah blah wɪlst … d’oh! no! waylst …

before continuing on with whatever I’m reading.

What I wonder is this: will it be possible for me to get over this reading-voice ‘hiccup’ that I have without actually adopting the use of whilst, myself?  This brings to mind questions regarding the accent one hears in one’s head while reading, and, in this case, if one is reading material that one knows is written by someone with a different accent.  I’m sure there are linguists out there who have smart things to say about this.  If that’s you, please leave a comment on this post!

Whilst you ponder that, let me leave you with a recent photo of Christchurch Meadow, at dusk…

Christchurch Meadow (January 2010)

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it’s all about the subtleties

You know when you’re staring off into space, your eyes looking at (but not really reading) some mundane writing in front of you, like the nutritional content of your cereal box, or the safety notice in the bus?  That’s what it was like this evening, as I stood at the kitchen sink, washing dishes, my eyes looking toward-but-not-really-at the bottle of hand soap on the sink’s edge.  And then I noticed what the label said:

http://www.carex.co.uk/products/protecting-antibacterial-handwash.htm

If you’re American, does anything strike you as odd about this slogan?  I mean, I’ve had this soap for a couple weeks, and never thought anything of it, either.  But tonight it occurred to me that I don’t/can’t use protecting in this way (as a present participle, I guess?).  I would rather expect to see the slogan “Protective Antibacterial Handwash.”  I think the only reason I noticed was that, as my eyes focused on the words, I realized I was expecting more of them.  In fact, my mind completed the superhero-esque slogan that wasn’t there: “Protecting Antibacterial Handwash From The Evils Of …” (oh, I dunno, what evils attack handwash?)  “… Dirty Water, Everywhere!” But this then leads to the bizarre reading of the label on the bottle as indicating that the bottle contains something which protects handwash, rather than being handwash that protects hands.

I’ve been living in the UK for seven weeks now, and as I suggested in my last post, the differences between US and UK English strike me as either big-n-obvious or small-n-subtle.  Much of the time they feel particularly subtle because I can’t even tell if they’re features of the majority of UK varieties in the area or if they’re specific, jargony aspects of Oxford (as Stan Carey‘s comment on my last post suggests).  In this case, I don’t know, offhand, if this soap slogan has anything do with UK Englishes or with the Carex soap brand, specifically.  Perhaps one of you will tell me.  Yet if even if you do, I wonder if I’ll ever get to the point where Americanisms and Britishisms are clearly, distinctly categorized in my mind, or if I’ll just continue to blend the two, so that my range of what feels grammatical simply expands increasingly?  Someone should ask me in a few months or a year if I find anything wrong with Protecting Handwash…

(Note-to-self to speak with my friend, Jennifer Nycz, about second dialect acquisition!)

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