Cross-dialectal Differences Research Articles

Dialectal differences in the Production of English Vowels by Iraqi EFL Learners at University Level

The present study investigates whether or not Iraqi EFL learners’ native dialect has an impact on their pronunciation of English monophthongs and to examine the reasons, behind the mispronunciation, they are expected to commit. To achieve this goal, sixty Iraqi participants speaking two Iraqi dialects i.e. qeltu and gilit dialect, were engaged to achieve a speech production task of the eleven English monophthongs in a /hvd/ context. The data were analyzed using PRAAT to extract first and second formant frequencies and as well as vowel duration for each vowel. Lobanov’s TELESUR G normalization algorithm (2006) was tracked to normalize F1 and F2 values. The normalized data were compared to results from Deterding (1997) and walls (1962). The results showed that Iraqi EFLLs produced the targeted vowels shorter than the control group represented by native English. In terms vowel quality, they produced lower and more fronted vowels than the control group. In addition, this study revealed that there are statistically significant cross-dialectal differences between gilit and qeltu-speaking EFLLs in the production English vowels. It is concluded that learners’ mother tongue has a role in their production of English vowels.

Acoustic differences between Chilean and Salvadoran Spanish /s/.

This paper examines seven acoustic properties of /s/ in Chilean Spanish (CS) and Salvadoran Spanish (ES). Acoustic measurements from 36 speakers, balanced for gender and dialect, reveal several cross-dialectal differences: CS /s/ was significantly longer than ES /s/ in coda position and had a higher spectral center of gravity. Two findings were mitigated by gender: women in both dialects were more likely to voice /s/, but the magnitude of the difference in voicing between male and female speakers was greater in CS. There were no differences in relative intensity in CS, while in ES, /s/ used by males has significantly lower relative intensity than /s/ used by females. No dialect differences were found for variance, kurtosis, or skewness. While both CS and ES are frequently collocated under the umbrella of "/s/ weakening dialects," our results show that tokens of non-deleted /s/ are acoustically distinct. These findings suggest that shorter duration and lower spectral energy in ES could be the result of a looser or backer constriction of /s/ and may have implications for work examining cross-dialectal differences in /s/ lenition at the phonetics/phonology interface.

Effects of regional dialect on oral-nasal balance and nasality perception

ABSTRACTWhile cross-dialectal variations in nasalance have been investigated in previous studies, the influence of regional dialect on listeners’ perceptual ratings of nasality has received limited research attention. This study explored cross-dialectal differences in the production of oral-nasal balance and the perception of nasality, with special emphasis on Inland North (IN) and Midland (M) dialects in the USA. Twenty-six adults representing the IN (n = 15) and M (n = 11) dialects participated in the study. Oral-nasal balance characteristics and nasality perception were compared between dialects using mean nasalance of various speech stimuli, measured via nasometry, and perceptual ratings of nasality of synthetic vowel stimuli, measured using direct magnitude estimation (DME). Despite similar mean nasalance scores between two regional dialects for standardized passage readings and sustained vowels, IN and M groups significantly differed in their perceptual ratings of nasality, with the DMEs of IN listeners being consistently and significantly higher, i.e. more nasal, than those of M listeners. Our findings provide evidence for perceptual variations of nasality that may exist at a dialectal level in addition to cross-linguistic variations in the perception of nasality as reported by Lee et al. (2008). Further research is needed to determine to what extent perceptual variations of nasality exist in other dialects and how these variations manifest in perceptual judgments of hypernasality and its severity ratings.

Comparison of perception-production vowel spaces for speakers of Standard Modern Greek and two regional dialects

This study compared the perception-production vowel spaces for speakers of Standard Modern Greek and two regional dialects. In experiment 1, participants produced the Greek vowels and chose vowel best exemplars (prototypes) in a natural sentence spoken in the participants' dialect. In experiment 2, the speakers who had made the recordings for experiment 1 chose themselves vowel prototypes. Cross-dialectal differences were found in both perception and production. Across dialects and experiments, participants' perceptual space was exaggerated compared to the acoustic one. Because participants' perceptual space in experiment 2 was calibrated to the participants own voice, perception and production data are directly comparable.

Native dialect effects in non-native production: Cuban and Peninsular learners of English

AbstractThis study investigates how learners with distinct native dialects, Cuban (CS) and Peninsular Spanish (PS), produce the English vowels æ, Λ, a/. Experiment 1 compares the native vowels along several acoustic parameters to determine the extent of the cross-dialectal differences, and Experiment 2 assesses the differences in L2 production of the same speakers who are also advanced learners of English. More fronted and shorter vowels are predicted for PS versus CS. As such, L2 /æ, A, a/ are expected to be more fronted in the interlanguage of PS learners as compared to CS learners. Dialect-specific patterns of assimilation are highlighted. PS learners produce æ, Λ, a/ with good spectral differences but with no duration differences whereas for CS learners /Λ, a/ overlap spectrally but are realized with different durations. Differences found in L2 production are caused by the conjoint effect of the native dialect, the input, and the learning experience.

A cross-dialectal acoustic study of the monophthongs and diphthongs of Welsh

The Welsh language has a complex vowel inventory with up to thirteen monophthongs and the same number of diphthongs. According to descriptive reports, systematic differences are found between the two main varieties of Welsh, Northern and Southern Welsh (Ball & Williams 2001, Jones 1984). However, few studies have attempted to verify these claims instrumentally, and little is known about the acoustic properties of Welsh vowels. The present study is the first systematic acoustic investigation of the monophthongs and diphthongs of Northern and Southern Welsh and includes measurements of formant trajectory length and spectral rate of change for the diphthongs (Fox & Jacewicz 2009).The results largely confirm claims about contrastive vowel categories in Northern and Southern Welsh. In contrast to auditory-based accounts, however, pairs of Northern Welsh vowels were found to differ, not only in terms of duration, but also vowel quality. The diphthongs, in turn, revealed interesting cross-dialectal differences in spectral dynamics across their trajectories. The results have implications for notions of contrastivity in languages with large vowel inventories.

The dative alternation in African American English: Researching syntactic variation and change across sociolinguistic datasets

Recent research has shown the dative alternation in English to be a productive arena for examining the relationship between group-level variation and the internalization of individuals' grammars. Experimental methods (e.g., Bresnan and Ford, Language 86: 168–213, 2010) and the analysis of large published corpora (e.g., Bresnan et al., Predicting the dative alternation, Amsterdam, 2007) have revealed subtle cross-dialect differences for this variable. The current paper seeks to improve our understanding of this feature and its bearings on experience-based models of grammar by examining African American English (AAE) data from sociolinguistic interviews and from historical letters written by semi-literate ex-slaves. We also consider some methodological problems of conducting corpus-like analyses on non-standard varieties.

Reconsidering the syntax of non-canonical negative inversion

Two main hypotheses have been proposed to account for the word order of negative inversion (NI) in varieties of non-canonical English (e.g.Don't nobody else care). An auxiliary inversion analysis argues that the word order is derived via movement of the auxiliary to the left periphery, whereas an existential analysis argues that the word order is an artifact of deletion of the expletive subject, parallelingthere-insertion existential constructions. After reviewing these hypotheses, I provide empirical evidence that neither of these theories adequately explains the peculiarities of NI. I advance a third hypothesis, namely that NI is the result of negative movement to the specifier of NegP, and that this movement is pragmatically motivated by an existential meaning in NI constructions. Syntactically, NI is made possible through the Neg-Criterion (Haegeman & Zanuttini 1991, 1996). This analysis explains problems encountered by prior analyses, and offers a unified analysis for variation in NI across dialects. Finally, I explain cross-dialectal differences in NI by considering the relationship between subject requirements and agreement.

Perception of Dialect Variation in Noise: Intelligibility and Classification

Listeners can explicitly categorize unfamiliar talkers by regional dialect with above-chance performance under ideal listening conditions. However, the extent to which this important source of variation affects speech processing is largely unknown. In a series of four experiments, we examined the effects of dialect variation on speech intelligibility in noise and the effects of noise on perceptual dialect classification. Results revealed that, on the one hand, dialect-specific differences in speech intelligibility were more pronounced at harder signal-to-noise ratios, but were attenuated under more favorable listening conditions. Listener dialect did not interact with talker dialect; for all listeners, at a range of noise levels, the General American talkers were the most intelligible and the Mid-Atlantic talkers were the least intelligible. Dialect classification performance, on the other hand, was poor even with only moderate amounts of noise. These findings suggest that at moderate noise levels, listeners are able to adapt to dialect variation in the acoustic signal such that some cross-dialect intelligibility differences are neutralized, despite relatively poor explicit dialect classification performance. However, at more difficult noise levels, participants cannot effectively adapt to dialect variation in the acoustic signal and cross-dialect differences in intelligibility emerge for all listeners, regardless of their dialect.

Vowel perception: Effects of non-native language vs. non-native dialect

Three groups of listeners identified the vowel in CV and VC syllables produced by an American English talker. The listeners were (a) native speakers of American English, (b) native speakers of Australian English (different dialect), and (c) native speakers of Dutch (different language). The syllables were embedded in multispeaker babble at three signal-to-noise ratios (0 dB, 8 dB, and 16 dB). The identification performance of native listeners was significantly better than that of listeners with another language but did not significantly differ from the performance of listeners with another dialect. Dialect differences did however affect the type of perceptual confusions which listeners made; in particular, the Australian listeners’ judgements of vowel tenseness were more variable than the American listeners’ judgements, which may be ascribed to cross-dialectal differences in this vocalic feature. Although listening difficulty can result when speech input mismatches the native dialect in terms of the precise cues for and boundaries of phonetic categories, the difficulty is very much less than that which arises when speech input mismatches the native language in terms of the repertoire of phonemic categories available.

Gradient auxiliary selection and impersonal passivization in German: an experimental investigation

The main purpose of this paper is to provide experimental evidence that two syntactic reflexes of split intransitivity in German – the selection of perfective auxiliaries and the impersonal passive construction – are sensitive to an aspectual/thematic hierarchy of verb classes. We show that there is a split between ‘core’ verbs that elicit categorical intuitions from native speakers, and ‘intermediate’ verbs that exhibit gradience. Furthermore, crossdialectal differences between northern and southern German with respect to auxiliary selection tend to occur only with intermediate verbs. We argue that these findings lend support to the view that the unaccusative/unergative distinction is considerably more unstable than often assumed, and suggest that projectionist theories of the lexicon-syntax interface such as those directly derived from the Unaccusative Hypothesis may not be able to account for the systematic variation exhibited by the data.

Dialect effects in vowel perception: the role of temporal information in French.

The importance of vowel duration for specifying vowel contrasts differs across languages. In English, for example, a number of vowel pairs are acoustically differentiated by both temporal and spectral information, whereas in standard French temporal information plays a much more minor role. Gottfried and Beddor (1988) reported that the effectiveness of vowel duration in perception varies accordingly: For native speakers of English, but not native speakers of standard French, a change in vowel duration affected the perceptual identity of a vowel contrast. We tested the hypothesis that the relative prominence of vowel duration within different dialects of a given language also has perceptual consequences. Vowel duration plays a much more important role in the phonological system of Swiss French than standard French. Given this, we predicted that native speakers of Swiss French, unlike native speakers of standard French, would use temporal information when identifying vowels. Our prediction was confirmed. These findings indicate that just as there are cross-language differences in fundamental aspects of speech perception, so too are there cross-dialect differences, and they support the view that the perceptual mapping between acoustic signal and vowel category is sensitive to global aspects of the listener's phonological system.

The voicing contrast in Spanish

An investigation of word-initial voiced and voiceless stop consonants obtained from Venezualan, Peruvian and Guatamalan Spanish dialect groups showed no significant cross-dialect differences in the distributions of voice onset time (VOT) values. In a perceptual study using a synthetic voicing series, VOT was shown to provide a sufficient cue for initial voicing for Peruvian Spanish monolinguals. However, the results of another study employing natural-speech material suggest that acoustic properties other than VOT may supply additional voicing cues to the Spanish listener. An acoustic feature termed presence versus absence of an abrupt consonant onset is described. This feature is claimed to be invariant across several phonetic environments in Spanish. It is suggested that this feature may be used by the Spanish listener in making a perceptual distinction between voiced and voiceless stop consonants in multiple environments.