American Speech Research Articles

Evidence for Greater Marking along Ethnic Boundaries.

The coordination of beliefs, norms, and behaviors is foundational to theories of group formation. However, because beliefs and norms are not directly observable, signaling mechanisms are required to build reliable signals of latent traits. Although the mathematical theory behind these signals is robust, there is very little testing of ethnic marker theory or of its key propositions that markers become more prevalent along ethnic boundaries and where more than two cultural groups are in contact. We present an ethnographic test of this theory with phonetic differences serving as potential group signals. The data derive from an ethnographic and linguistic investigation in two contrasting secondary school settings in Utah, one that is majority European American and one that is ethnically more diverse. Word list recordings were collected as part of interviews with teens from different backgrounds. We extracted acoustic data from the speech of European Americans (EAs) and Pacific Islanders (PIs), then analyzed differences in the pronunciation of the vowel in words such as "bit." We found evidence of greater phonetic marking at the more diverse school, along more prominent boundaries of ethnic interaction. These results align with predictions made by the theoretical models. This initial empirical test of model predictions provides justification for the development of more complex models that could account for more variables within the environment.

Image restoration strategies in pandemic crisis communication: a comparative analysis of Chinese and American COVID-19 political speeches

This study explores the effectiveness of image restoration strategies in pandemic crisis communication at the highest levels of administration. By integrating corpus-assisted discourse analysis with Image Repair Theory, it aims to uncover the prevailing strategies adopted by Chinese and American leaders to restore or enhance a positive national image in the post-COVID era. Lancsbox 6.0 was utilized to extract excerpts and analyze linguistic devices from a self-built corpus of 144 political speeches delivered by top leaders in China and the United States. The results reveal that Chinese leaders, through the use of shared image restoration strategies such as bolstering and transcendence, shape a positive national image of a responsible country. In contrast, American leaders construct a confident and ambitious national image, projecting a leading geopolitical role in the world. These strategies have distinct features that contribute to the image restoration process. Apart from contributing significantly to the comparative research on Chinese and American pandemic-related political speeches, the research findings carry implications for the practice and promotion of national ideologies. The study also highlights the diverse ways in which credible and accurate crisis messages are employed, providing valuable insights for handling pandemics or other crises in the foreseeable or distant future.

Speaking for the downtrodden

Abstract Most linguistic studies of political speaking in the field of critical discourse analysis tend to focus on speeches delivered by prominent politicians either in a domestic party-political setting or in the international arena. Less attention has been afforded to speeches by civil rights activists and campaigners for other progressive causes. To fill this gap, the present paper focuses on political speaking occurring outside of the party-political setting. The data comprises 120 American activist speeches from the years 1808–2016. The analysis focuses on the construction of ingroups and outgroups, and whether the use of personal pronouns is affected by the type of audience. The frequency trends bring forth new information about the referential complexity of pronouns within individual speeches.

Ideological Positioning in War Discourse: A Critical Stylistic Analysis of Selected American and Syrian Political Speeches on the 2022 Russian-Ukrainian War

Ideological Positioning in War Discourse: A Critical Stylistic Analysis of Selected American and Syrian Political Speeches on the 2022 Russian-Ukrainian War

Critical discourse analysis study of stance taking and positioning in American and Russian political speeches

The goal of the current study is to look into the various stance-taking techniques utilized in American and Russian political speeches. Examining these forms' lexical and grammatical forms, semantic and discoursal roles, and social relevance in establishing the speaker's place and ideology are all important. Thus, based on Fairclough's (1995) dialectical-relational approach of CDA, the current study analysis six political speeches. They study concludes that the prevalent application of certain markers, whether in terms of highly significant words or grammatical things, has symbolically conveyed the speakers level of confidence and knowledge. Their adoption of engagement formalizations demonstrated their propensity to consider other people's perspectives, but they do not value them as highly as their own beliefs and attitudes. They create a dialogue space for different viewpoints, but they take care to prevent them from receiving the same endorsement as their own. Engagement conveys a conviction in this way.

Discourse analysis in Ulysses and The Sound and the Fury

Abstract The literary style of modernist authors like James Joyce (1882-1941) and William Faulkner (1897-1962) is deeply experimental. Their complexity is intertwined with the desire to retell local, national stories as seen through the eyes of losers from which small literary cosmoses are the desires result to re-adapt domestic spaces. This research does not leave a path for the use of language as a transparent means of expression, but at the same time makes it impossible to express fiction through more linear and elaborative methods, leaving the direct elaboration subordinate, shown from the viewpoint of the marginalized, the oppressed. Their speaking variety is conveyed through repetitions, fixations, alienations, and disturbing endings. The two authors create neologisms that signal dissatisfaction with the limitations of conventional language. Joyce includes Hiberno-English in Ulysses (1920) as a means of cacophonous addition to the voices and styles, just as Faulkner includes the African American speech of the American South. They operate on the differences of their traditions. Joyce attacks the use of syntax, being more interested in the order of words within the sentence, the same concern with syntactic structure that we also see in Faulkner.

Analysis of forced aligner performance on L2 English speech

There is growing interest in how speech technologies perform on L2 speech. Largely omitted from this discussion are tools used in the early data processing steps, such as forced aligners, that can introduce errors and biases. This study adds to the conversation and tests how well a model pre-trained for the alignment of L1 American English speech performs on L2 English speech. We test and discuss the impact of language variety, demographic factors, and segment type on the performance of the forced aligner. We also examine systematic errors encountered.Forty-five speakers representing nine L2 varieties were selected from the Speech Accent Archive and force aligned using the Montreal Forced Aligner. The phoneme-level boundary placements were manually corrected in order to assess differences between the automatic and manual alignments. Results show marked variation in the performance across language groups and segment types for the two metrics used to assess accuracy: Onset Boundary Displacement, a distance metric between the automatic and manual boundary placements, and Overlap Rate, which indicates to what extent the automatically aligned segment overlaps with the manually aligned segment. The highest accuracy on both measures was obtained for German and French, and lowest accuracy for Russian. The aligner's performance on all varieties was comparable to that on conversational American English and non-standard varieties of English. Furthermore, the percentage of boundary placements within 10 and 20 ms of the corrected boundary was similar to that observed between transcribers. Apart from errors due to variety mismatch, most issues encountered in the alignment were due to issues not exclusive to L2 speech such as inaccurate orthographic transcriptions, hesitations, specific voice qualities, and background noise.The results of this study can inform the use of automatic aligners on L2 English speech and provide a baseline of potential errors and information to help the development of more robust alignment tools for further development of automatic systems using L2 English.

The Low-Back-Merger Shift: Evidence from MENA Americans in the Upper Midwest and southern California

Middle Eastern or North African (MENA) Americans are an understudied speech community in sociolinguistics. In terms of racial classification and identification, MENA Americans have been legally and historically classified as white but are not socially perceived as white (Beydoun, 2013, 2015). While early immigrants from MENA regions to the US were mostly Christians, ever since 1947, the majority of immigrants from MENA regions to the US have been from Muslim backgrounds (Orfalea, 2006); this demographic change can result in more ethnic visibility for MENA Americans in the US (cf., e.g., Shryock & Lin, 2009, for a discussion of ethnic visibility of MENA Americans in southeastern Michigan). Higher ethnic visibility can in turn lead to certain linguistic performances on the part of MENA Americans. Several studies have looked at the interaction of ethnic identity/visibility and local vowel patterns such as the merging of the low back vowels (the vowels in THOUGHT and LOT1). For example, Hall–Lew (2009) showed that Asian Americans in San Francisco took part in the low back vowel merger and high back vowel fronting, which both index local meanings being part of the California Vowel Shift (Eckert, 2008). Going beyond one particular locality, Wong and Hall–Lew (2014) demonstrated clear influence of local dialect on the speech of Asian Americans in two different localities, with Asian Americans from NYC having distinct low back vowels and those from San Francisco merged low back vowels. Comparing the speech of three different ethnic groups in the multicultural context of Toronto, Hoffman and Walker (2010) explored two features of the Canadian Vowel Shift: the retraction of TRAP and the lowering and retraction of DRESS. Their findings showed that while Chinese Canadians disfavored these two patterns, British/Irish and Italian Canadians favored them. In another study in the context of California English, Cardoso et al. (2016) looked at subclasses of the TRAP vowel in the speech of Chinese Americans and white Americans of San Francisco. They found that the nasal split of TRAP (it being raised when followed by a nasal consonant, and being retracted and lowered when followed by an oral consonant) was more advanced for white speakers than the Chinese group. Cardoso et al. (2016) associated the observed difference to the social meaning of the TRAP nasal split in California indexing white or non-Chicanx social personae.

Phonetic variation in English infant-directed speech: A large-scale corpus analysis

Learning sound categories is central to language acquisition – but we know little about the extent of phonetic variability in the learner’s input. In this study, we phonetically annotated coronal segments (/t/, /d/, /s/, /z/, and /n/) in a corpus of naturalistic American English infant-directed speech (IDS). We did not find evidence that IDS is consistently more canonical than adult-directed speech (ADS), challenging the notion of IDS as a learning register. While IDS is not more canonical than ADS overall, the canonical form was nonetheless the most frequent form in IDS for all segments except /t/. We also considered how infants may move beyond the task of identifying the canonical form to how they may learn to cluster allophones; for this purpose, we quantified the dissimilarity in the phonological environments of the variants in question. Lastly, we investigated a case in which the overwhelming majority of instantiations were not canonical – word-final t and d – and demonstrated that morphologically-conditioned suffixes were more canonical than other word final segments. This corpus is a vital step towards understanding how infants can learn to categorize sounds from their input and will be an invaluable tool for future sociolinguistic, computational and theoretical modeling of language learning.

Семантика и контекст употребления перфекта в современном американском английском: корпусное исследование

The article identifies the main ways in which the Present Perfect meanings are expressed in the oral speech of the US citizens speaking American English. The necessity to study in detail how the Present Perfect functions in modern American English is attributed to the emerging reports emphasizing the existing functional instability of these forms in the speech of Americans. This tendency shows that the Present Perfect loses its ability to express traditional perfect meanings. Therefore, the aim of the study is twofold: to apply the methods of corpus linguistics in order to confirm that the semantics of the perfect and preterite forms tend to merge in modern American English, as well as to collect and describe the contexts in which the preterite substitutes the Present Perfect forms in their traditional meanings. We created a corpus of oral texts and collected the data reflecting the frequency of the perfect and preterite forms found in the speech of the respondents. Based on the comparative analysis, we carried out the research determining the percentage ratio of the perfect meanings expressed by the preterite forms. It was found that today in the oral speech of the US women aged 18–25 the preterite verb forms substitute the perfect verb forms in their traditional meanings in almost a third of the contexts. At the same time, the preterite replaces the perfect only in its ‘stative’ and ‘existential’ meanings. The findings confirm the hypothesis that the Present Perfect evolves in American English in accordance with the scenario of “arrested” grammaticalization where the semantics of the perfect and the preterite merge.

Culturally Specific Messaging and the Explanation of Contact in Impacted Bilinguals

A sketch is offered of a framework that would abandon the familiar notion of a language and the accompanying question of whether it has changed under contact. The framework would focus instead on speakers and on the linguistic consequences of people contact. Speakers in contact settings are not failing or deviating from a language’s norm while attempting to say the same things that are said in non-contact settings; rather, they are succeeding at saying different things. New arrivals face vast differences in the conceptualization of referents between their home precursor setting and the new encounter setting. These differences in conceptualization give rise to large numbers of changes in what speakers say. In most cases, these new things they say are just that, new speech or new messaging with no change in the grammar. But in a minority of cases, the new messaging does have linguistic, that is, grammatical consequences. Changes in the grammars of people in contact thus result not only, and perhaps not primarily, from formal copying or modeling but are responses to new conceptualizations prevailing in the new environment. The distinction between expressions reflecting only new conceptualizations, and those reflecting new conceptualizations and new grammar carries theoretical implications for the way linguists think about the grammars of bilinguals. And it carries applied implications for the way educators think about the linguistic performance of bilingual students, especially in social settings where they are minoritized. Data are drawn from the speech of Latin Americans and their descendants in New York City and other U.S. locales.

The Pragmatics of Bias in American Political Speeches

This study deals with analyzing bias in selected American political speeches from a pragmatic perspective. The study aims at finding out the pragmatic strategies that American politicians exploit to issue bias in their political speeches. For the sake of clarification, this aim can be sub-divided into the following aims: (a) Specifying the speech acts that are utilized by American politician to issue bias, (b) Showing to what extent American politician exploit Grice’s maxims to realize bias, (c)Shedding light on the categories of presupposition that are available in the selected data, (d) Identifying the impoliteness strategies and sub- strategies that are used to issue bias in the political speeches uttered by an American politician, and (e) Specifying the tropes that are utilized to realize bias in the selected data. To achieve the aims of the study and test the validity of its hypotheses, the following procedures are adopted: three random speeches for an American politician have been selected to be analysed according to the adopted eclectic model to identify the types of bias and the pragmatic strategies utilized to issue bias in the selected data. At the end of the research, there are the major findings that the researchers arrived at.

Auditory processing disorders in children – diagnosisand management

Introduction: Auditory Processing Disorders (APD) is a syndrome characterized by impairment of the perception of soundsverbal and non-verbal ones, and weakening cognitive abilities such as auditory attention and auditory memory. This symptoms occur despite correct functioning of the peripheral part of the organ of hearing. Aim: A review of the current literature on diagnostic criteria of APD and its subtypes, clinical symptoms in children, diagnostic procedures and methods and therapeutic interventions. Methods: The study was based on the guidelines of the British Audiological Society (BSA), the guidelines of the American Speech, Language and Hearing Society (ASHA) as well as a literature review in the PubMed database. Results: APD is divided into developmental (without an established cause), acquired (with an established cause) and secondary (a consequence of long-term peripheral hearing loss). Symptoms that indicate the likelihood of APD in schoolaged children include: poor school performance, problems with learning to read and write and understanding speech, difficulties in repeating and remembering information given by hearing and maintaining attention on the spoken word. APD diagnosis should be made by a specialist in audiology and phoniatrics based on a full battery of tests and consultations with a speech therapist, psychologist and pedagogue. The set of behavioral diagnostic tests should include both verbal and non-verbal tests, from at least three groups of tests: dichotic (e.g. dichotic digit test; DDT), evaluating temporal aspects of hearing (e.g. Frequency Pattern Test; FPT and Duration Pattern Test; DPT ) and low redundancy speech tests. The diagnosis can be made when the child is at least 7 years old, the result is below the norm in at least two tests evaluating different auditory processes and the child has previous been excluded from intellectual disability and autism spectrum disorders. The therapeutic procedure is based on active auditory training, specific for the deficit shown in the tests. It is important to improve the acoustic environment at school (FM systems) and to treat comorbidities. Conclusions: Diagnostics and therapy of APD requires a highly qualified team of specialists and should be carried out in centers specially prepared for this purpose.

Critical discourse Analysis of Torturing Male Prisoners in Abu Ghraib in The Independent's Political reports

The present study under the title "Critical discourse Analysis of Torturing Male Prisoners in Abu Ghraib in The Independent's Political reports" is interested in revealing issues of power, dominance and ideologies in the political reports which talk about violence against men in Abu Ghraib. Revealing these issues in the report will be according to the use of CDA approach depending on the two scholars who are interested in this approach, Tuen Van Dijk, Norman Fairclough. In this study, there is a use of language as a tool to express dominance, power and ideology. With these linguistic elements, the previous issues are exploited indirectly by the American forces. 
 We aim in this study to identify all the linguistic elements which symbolize violence in the selected report. Then, we will explain its function in this report which is used pragmatically. After that, we explain the issues of power, dominance and ideologies and check whether they are used in these reports implicitly or explicitly.
 We selected one report to be analyzed in this paper. This report was taken from the British Newspaper "The Independent". Selecting these Extracts was based on the use of many linguistic elements which refer to violence in Abu Ghraib.
 We used the qualitative approach in analyzing the data, because we deal with behavioral study, and it is the preferable approach in analyzing studies like these. In this method, we depend on the narrative way in the analysis rather than using numbers or statistics. The model adopted in this study will be an eclectic one depending on Fairclough's three-dimensional approach and Van Dijk's socio-cognitive approach. These models are interested in the texts with their social and cultural function.
 The findings have included the use of linguistic elements of violence in these reports in many lines. The function of these linguistic elements was used indirectly in a hidden way. The study also revealed that issues of power, dominance and ideologies were exploited pragmatically in the American speeches. Our aims and Hypothesis have been achieved in the findings and conclusions. In the last lines of chapter five, we gave some recommendations and suggestions for further studies.

Portraying accent stereotyping by second language speakers.

Stereotyping towards the second language accent of second language learners is extensively seen even when the content of learner speech can be understood. Previous studies reported conflicting results on accent perception by speakers of second languages, especially among homogenous learners. In this paper, we conducted a survey and two experiments to test whether Mandarin-speaking advanced learners of English may give harsher accent ratings to their fellow learners than to Standard American English speakers. The survey was designed to understand the L2 listeners' beliefs about accented speech. In Experiment 1, participants rated short audio recordings of L2 learner' and Standard American English speech; in Experiment 2, they did the same in a more detailed word-in-sentence accent rating task. Results showed a markedly high level of perceived L2 accentedness for several learner speech stimuli despite good intelligibility, especially for the strongly-accented Cantonese passage and for specific vowel and consonant types. The findings reveal the existence of native-speakerism in China and highlight existing accent stereotypes. Implications for policymaking and language teaching are discussed.

Raciolinguistics: What’s Now and What’s Next

Book Review| May 01 2023 Raciolinguistics: What’s Now and What’s Next The Oxford Handbook of Language and RaceEdited by Alim, H. Samy; Reyes, Angela; Kroskrity, Paul V.New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. xii + 533. ISBN 9780190845995; $150 (ebk $149.99) Hannah Lukow Hannah Lukow University of Pennsylvania hannah lukow is an applied sociolinguist, recent graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, and incoming PhD student at The Pennsylvania State University. Her research explores the role of race and racialization in second language learning as well as the semiotics of multilingual writing. Email: hlukow@upenn.edu. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Speech (2023) 98 (2): 225–232. https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-10623467 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site Citation Hannah Lukow; Raciolinguistics: What’s Now and What’s Next. American Speech 1 May 2023; 98 (2): 225–232. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-10623467 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsAmerican Dialect SocietyAmerican Speech Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2023 by the American Dialect Society2023 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Not much “I” in “Team”: Content analysis of pregame speeches in American football

Although researchers have explored the effects of coach pregame speeches, little is known about the actual content, delivery, and environmental context of the speeches themselves. This study was a descriptive analysis of 127 ( n = 77 intercollegiate, n = 37 high school, and n = 13 cinematic) American football pregame speeches. The speeches were viewed, transcribed, coded, and analyzed via the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC2015) software program. Actual speeches were compared with natural speech norms and speeches appearing in movies pertaining to American football. In general, the pregame speeches were characterized by use of confident, analytical, motivational, emotionally tinged language that is collectively oriented and present and future focused. The speeches delivered to high school teams were substantially similar to those delivered to intercollegiate teams. The actual speeches differed from natural speech on numerous variables and from the cinematic speeches on some descriptive variables. The findings suggest that actual American football pregame speeches are fundamentally similar to cinematic American football pregame speeches and constitute a distinct form of communication that is tailored to the unique demands of the situation.

Violence against Male in Abu Ghraib in The New Yorker's political Reports

The present study under the title " Violence against Male in Abu Ghraib in The New Yorker's political Reports" is interested in revealing issues of power, dominance and ideologies in the political reports which talk about violence against men in Abu Ghraib. Revealing these issues in the report will be according to the use of CDA approach depending on the two scholars who are interested in this approach, Tuen Van Dijk, Norman Fairclough. In this study, there is a use of language as a tool to express the dominance, power and ideology. With these linguistic elements, the previous issues are exploited indirectly by the American forces. 
 We aim in this study to identify all the linguistic elements which symbolize violence in the selected report. Then, we will explain its function in this report which is used pragmatically. After that, we explain the issues of power, dominance and ideologies and check whether they are used in these reports implicitly or explicitly.
 We selected one report to be analysed in this paper. This report was taken from the American weekly magazine "The New Yorker". Selecting these Extracts was based on the using of many linguistic elements which refer to violence in Abu Ghraib. 
 We used the qualitative approach in analyzing the data, because we deal with behavioral study, and it is the preferable approach in analyzing studies like these. In this method, we depend on the narrative way in the analysis rather than using numbers or statistics. The model adopted in this study will be eclectic one depending on Fairclough's three-dimensional approach and Van Dijk's socio-cognitive approach. These models are interested in the texts with their social and cultural function.
 The findings have included the use of linguistic elements of violence in these reports in many lines. The function of these linguistic elements was used indirectly in a hidden way. The study also revealed that issues of power, dominance and ideologies were exploited pragmatically in the American speeches. Our aims and Hypothesis have been achieved in the findings and conclusions. In the last lines of chapter five, we gave some recommendations and suggestions for further studies.

Collegiate Black Women and YouTube Poems

ABSTRACT Access to a range of audio and video recordings of poems gives African American students exciting opportunities to engage literary art. Their interest in “YouTube poems” reflects an important combination: a longstanding veneration of dynamic African American speech acts and new developments in the circulation and consumption of poetry. Audio recordings and YouTube facilitate the interplay of technology and enduring Black verbal practices in African American literature classes in ways that are far less possible when professors only assign print-based texts. Just as important, engaging YouTube poems created pathways for Black women students to actively participate in cultural criticism.

The [s → ʃ] sound change in /str-/ contexts: Acoustic and perceptual results

Since 1995 [Shapiro, M. A case of distant assimilation: /str/ → /ʃ tr/. American Speech, 70, 101–107], many studies have noted a sound change occurring in some dialects of English with /s/ in the context /strV/ surfacing as [ʃ trV]. At first the phenomenon was restricted to certain contexts, though studies disagree on which; increasingly, those who produce the change do so in all contexts. Is the fricative is truly identical to / ʃ / as produced by the same speaker? Or is it acoustically on a continuum, though perhaps perceived as one category or the other? In a corpus of real words, speaker W1 was perceived as exhibiting the sound change, and her /s/ spectra in /str/ context were distinctly different from her /s/ spectra in other contexts. However, speaker M1, though not perceived as exhibiting the sound change, showed spectral differences similar to W1’s. Here, acoustic measures that we have developed to characterize the [s → ʃ] difference will be applied to a more extensive corpus, and will also be related to results of formal perception tasks for multiple listeners. It is anticipated that a continuum will emerge, with perceptual classification into categories resulting in the reported sound change.