Kendall, TylerMcLarty, Jason2020-02-272020-02-272020-02-27https://hdl.handle.net/1794/25258Although much work has investigated various aspects of African American English (AAE), prosodic features of AAE have remained relatively underexamined (e.g. McLarty 2018; Thomas 2015). Studies have, however, identified prosodic differences between AAE and European American English (EAE) varieties, with AAE speakers found to have generally more dynamic prosody than EAE speakers. Despite these findings, the extent to which listeners perceive these differences remains unclear, as well as which specific phonetic features, alone or in concert, contribute to the differences. To address this gap in knowledge, this dissertation project utilized the Rapid Prosodic Transcription (RPT) task developed by Cole et al. (2010, 2017) to determine how much sensitivity listeners have to prominence variation in conversational speech excerpts from male and female African Americans and European Americans from North Carolina. Crucially, participants are drawn from three different listener groups, who represent a range of experience with AAE and EAE speech: African American listeners from North Carolina, European American listeners from North Carolina, and European American listeners from Oregon. In addition to examining listeners in terms of their regional background and ethnicity, listeners’ own self-reports about their experience with AAE are used to further explore the role of experience in prominence perception. Results indicate that African American voices are heard as having significantly more prominences in their speech than the European American speakers, a finding in line with prior literature on production-based differences. Further, findings identify some differences between the listener groups, but also show that the listeners generally attend to linguistic factors in similar ways for these voices despite different regional backgrounds, ethnicities and self-reported experiences with AAE. The methodological approach and findings in this dissertation provide a a new avenue for sociolinguistic research on prosody, while also providing insights on the relationship between production and perception.en-USAll Rights Reserved.African American EnglishPerceptionProsodic ProminenceSociolinguisticsElectronic Thesis or Dissertation