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Article published In:
Pragmatics & Cognition
Vol. 27:2 (2020) ► pp.457–473

An experimental study of the detection of clicks in English

| University of St. Thomas
| University of St. Thomas

This experimental study sets out to determine whether people detect click sounds in American English. Recent research has documented the use of non-phonemic clicks in a variety of languages to fulfill a range of functions such as sequence management or signaling searches and different types of attitudinal stance. While these clicks are acoustically salient and have been reported to occur with a frequency of up to 14 per minute in British English, they have not been widely investigated until relatively recently. For this experiment, we designed video stimuli consisting of A and B pairs of approximately 10 seconds of speech, one with a click and the other with the click edited out. We gave 118 participants a questionnaire and asked if they could detect a difference between the pairs of videos. The results indicate that the majority of participants, between 79% and 86%, do not detect click sounds.

Keywords: clicks, detection, experimental study, paralinguistics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
  • 3.Method
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2Video stimuli
    • 3.3Preliminary experiments
      • 3.3.1Edit detection
      • 3.3.2Pilot
    • 3.4Instrument and procedure
    • 3.5Data coding and analysis
    • 3.6Research hypotheses
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Quantitative
    • 4.2Qualitative
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Published online: 6 October 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.20009.vig
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