Effects of sex and age in the Arjeplog dialect: a listening test and measurements of preaspiration and VOT

This study tested whether older speakers are ‘more dialectal’ than younger speakers, and whether men are more dialectal than women. Speech material from the Arjeplog dialect was used in a listening test and a set of durational measurements of preaspiration and VOT. In the listening test, unscripted monologues produced by 3 men and 3 women of an older generation, and 3 men and 3 women of a younger generation were presented to 19 young listeners. The younger women were judged as less dialectal than the remaining speakers, but no significant differences were observed between the remaining speaker groups. Measurement results revealed that the older speakers displayed longer preaspiration intervals than did the younger speakers but, contrary to the hypothesis, women turned out to produce longer preaspirations and VOTs than the men. No significant age-related VOT differences were observed.