Low Back Vowel Research Articles

When PALMs are in your THOUGHTs, you head south: Evidence for diffusion of the low-back vowel system from New York to New Orleans

In New Orleans, there is a white, working-class dialect of English, sometimes called “Yat”, that has several notable similarities with that of New York City. These similarities have been argued to be the result of 19th-century dialect contact between residents of the two cities. This paper examines the palm vowel in New Orleans and argues that it too shows evidence of diffusion from New York around this time period. Words of the palm lexical set that have been part of the English lexicon since before the 19th century, such as father and calm, are found to be merged with the thought phoneme in New Orleans, while more recent palm words such as garage are merged with lot. A handful of traditional lot words, such as John and god, are also sporadically attested with the thought phoneme. Since traditional New York City English also possesses a palm vowel backer than lot, with words such as John and god variably included in it—a pattern that is not widely found in other dialects closely connected to New Orleans English—the findings are interpreted as further evidence for dialect diffusion from New York to New Orleans.

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.

Effects of Gender on Emphasis Production in Jordanian Arabic: A Socio-Phonetic Study

This article investigates the effects of gender on two emphatic sounds, namely [sˤ] and [tˤ], in Ajlouni-Jordanian Arabic, a sub-dialect of Rural Jordanian Arabic. The study was mainly motivated by the relatively small literature on the bearing(s) of gender on emphasis production in Jordanian Arabic in general and in Ajlouni Jordanian Arabic specifically. To do so, the effects gender has on emphasis productions in this dialect were tested in mono- and bi-syllabic words, with the emphatic sounds occurring both word-initially and word-finally. The vowel qualities which were incorporated in the stimuli of this study include the long low-back vowel [a:], the short low-back vowel [a], the long high-front vowel [i:], the short mid-high front vowel [ɪ], the long high-back vowel [u:] and the short mid-high back vowel [ʊ]. The sample of this study consisted of 12 native speakers of Ajlouni-Jordanian Arabic, with each speaker producing 48 minimal pairs. The acoustic measurements that were carried out on the data are consonant duration (CD), Voice Onset Time (VOT), and the vowel first three formant frequencies (F1, F2, and F3). The study showed that, relative to gender, only VOT was a reliable acoustic correlate of emphasis where CD, on the one hand, and F1, F2, and F3 in both the target and non-target syllables, on the other hand, showed no significance.

A new majority

AbstractRepresentativeness in regional dialectology is critical to avoid essentialization when describing regional and ethnic language variation. Yet, regional vowel studies still tend to focus on majority-white communities. Additionally, lack of research on the Great Plains leaves research on regional variation in Latinx Englishes incomplete. We examine a majority-Latinx community in a dialect region where the Low Back Vowel Merger Shift (LBMS) is widespread to examine participation in this sound shift and to document Latinx variation in the Great Plains. Findings illustrate the widespread presence of the LBMS for all participants, but with a less pronounced prenasaltrap/bansplit. The latter represents a vocalic pattern attested in numerous US Latinx communities. Anglos from the majority-Latinx field site variably pattern with their Latinx peers in their production ofban.These patterns illustrate participation in regional sound changes while also documenting supra-regional variation and local participation in Latinx English variants by Anglo peers.

Effect of Speaker Age on Listener Perceptions of Word-Final /l/.

This study investigated an effect of speaker age on listeners' perception of word-final /l/ produced by child and adult speakers of Southern White Vernacular English, a dialect that shows higher rates of word-final /l/ vocalization than other dialects of English. Stimuli included children and adults' word-final /l/ embedded in monosyllabic words in two vowel contexts (/i, ɪ/ and /ɔ, ɑ/). A total of 25 monolingual adult listeners listened to each word and were asked to judge the /l/-likeness using a visual analog scale. Average listener ratings and three acoustic measures (F2 transition rate [F2 TR] and F2-F1 [Hz] values at 20% and 80% time points along the vowel-/l/ duration) were analyzed. Adult productions were rated more as correct /l/ than those of children in both vowel contexts, despite the similarity in their F2 TR and F2-F1 values at the 80% time point. Correlation between the acoustic measures and the average listener ratings were weak for all three measures for adults' productions. For children's productions, while the correlation with F2 TR values were weak, moderate significant correlations were found for F2-F1 values at the 20% and 80% time points. In terms of vowel context, word-final /l/ in the high front vowel context was rated more as /l/ than those in low back vowel context. Findings suggest that listeners are more likely to accept word-final /l/ as being correct when produced by adult speakers, regardless of their acoustic characteristics, but more likely to perceive an error when produced by a child and attend more to acoustic information for their perceptual judgment. This highlights the importance of considering children's dialectal background when judging word-final /l/, which is more likely to be vocalized in certain dialects and certain vowel contexts, and thus can be misjudged without such consideration.

Generational Phases: Toward the Low-Back Merger in Cooperstown, New York

This paper reports on a new sociolinguistic sample of Cooperstown, a village in rural central New York. Previous research suggested Cooperstown was losing the Northern Cities Shift (NCS) and acquiring the low back merger via koineization as a result of dialect contact among locally-born children of parents from other regions. The new data shows abrupt retreat from NCS patterns between the Baby Boom generation and Generation X. A “phase transition” pattern is observed in progress toward the low back merger: Millennial women are the first to describe low back minimal pairs as merged, despite no appreciable difference between Millennials and Generation X in production of the low back vowels. No evidence is found to support the hypothesis that koineization is responsible for these changes; it appears that Cooperstown is subject to the same trend away from NCS documented in many other communities, subject to many of the same constraints.

Akkadian [e


 
 
 There are several features of Akkadian that set it apart from other Semitic languages. One such feature is the assumption of seven alefs that descended from Proto-Semitic phonemes, *ʔ, *h, *ʕ, *ɣ, *ħ, and sometimes *w and *j. The standard account is that they merged before being lost in nearly every environment. Additionally, ʔ3-5 interact with the low-back vowel, [a], producing [e]. Two other issues regarding the shift from [a] to [e] is which environments [e] surfaces in to be reanalyzed, and the fact that there are several roots that have [e] and no apparent conditioning environment. In this article I provide a solution to these issues clarifying the conditioning environments obscured by Akkadian orthography and Semitic derivational morphology. I show that voicing assimilation alone is responsible for the different outcomes of *ħ and *ʕ, which have the same distribution. This assimilation has parallels in non-guttural roots such as *√ntn, which becomes √ndn in Akkadian. Whether *ʕ and *ħ surface as <∅> or <ḫ> depends less on the underlying form than on assimilation to the voicing value of the adjacent consonant radical. With this analysis, there is no reason left to reject Kowenburg’s theory (2006) that gutturals became glides which cause raising to [e], with the slight amendment that it is the voiced variant *ʕ alone which becomes a glide.
 
 

Is a boat bigger than a ship? Null results in the investigation of vowel sound symbolism on size judgements in real language.

Sound symbolism is the phenomenon by which certain kinds of phonemes are associated with perceptual and/or semantic properties. In this article, we explored size sound symbolism (i.e., the mil/mal effect) in which high-front vowels (e.g., /i/) show an association with smallness, while low-back vowels (e.g., /ɑ/) show an association with largeness. This has previously been demonstrated with nonwords, but its impact on the processing of real language is unknown. We investigated this using a size judgement task, in which participants classified words for small or large objects, containing a small- or large-associated vowel, based on their size. Words were presented auditorily in Experiment 1 and visually in Experiment 2. We did not observe an effect of vowel congruence (i.e., between object size and the size association of its vowel) in either of the experiments. This suggests that there are limits to the impact of sound symbolism on the processing of real language.

Food for /θɔt/ or /θɑt/?

The English low back vowel merger, where words like caught and cot are pronounced identically, is a well-studied phenomenon. Generally, these studies focus on mergers within given regions, comparing vowels of non-mobile individuals. My research differs in exploring the effects of relocation. I examine pronunciation differences of vowels in differently gendered twins from England who moved to Canada as children. Despite growing up in similar environments, their vowel patterns differ: there is some evidence of merger in the female’s but not the male’s vowels. This suggests that mobility and exposure to a new dialect may affect pronunciation changes but are not the sole factors.

Back Vowel Dynamics and Distinctions in Southern American English

Southern American English is spoken in a large geographic region in the United States. Its characteristics include back-vowel fronting (e.g., in goose, foot, and goat), which has been ongoing since the mid-nineteenth century; meanwhile, the low back vowels (in lot and thought) have recently merged in some areas. We investigate these five vowels in the Digital Archive of Southern Speech, a legacy corpus of linguistic interviews with sixty-four speakers born 1886-1956. We extracted 89,367 vowel tokens and used generalized additive mixed-effects models to test for socially-driven changes to both their relative phonetic placements and the shapes of their formant trajectories. Our results reinforce previous descriptions of Southern vowels while contributing additional phonetic detail about their trajectories. Goose-fronting is a change in progress, with greatest fronting after coronal consonants. Goat is quite dynamic; it lowers and fronts in apparent time. Generally, women have more fronted realizations than men. Foot is largely monophthongal, and stable across time. Lot and thought are distinct and unmerged, occupying different regions of the vowel space. While their relative positions change across generations, all five vowels show a remarkable consistency in formant trajectory shapes across time. This study’s results reveal social and phonetic details about the back vowels of Southerners born in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: goose-fronting was well underway, goat-fronting was beginning, but foot remained backed, and the low back vowels were unmerged.

Acoustic Characteristics of Pre- and Post-vocalic /l/: Patterns from One Southern White Vernacular English.

This study examined acoustic characteristics of the phoneme /l/ produced by young female and male adult speakers of Southern White Vernacular English (SWVE) from Louisiana. F1, F2, and F2-F1 values extracted at the /l/ midpoint were analyzed by word position (pre- vs. post-vocalic) and vowel contexts (/i, ɪ/ vs. /ɔ, a/). Descriptive analysis showed that SWVE /l/ exhibited characteristics of the dark /l/ variant. The formant patterns of /l/, however, differed significantly by word position and vowel context, with pre-vocalic /l/ showing significantly higher F2-F1 values than post-vocalic /l/, and /l/ in the high front vowel context showing significantly higher F2-F1 values than those in the low back vowel context. Individual variation in the effects of word position and vowel contexts on /l/ pattern was also observed. Overall, the findings of the current study showed a gradient nature of SWVE /l/ variants whose F2-F1 patterns generally fell into the range of the dark /l/ variant, while varying by word position and vowel context.

Size sound symbolism in the English lexicon

Experimental and cross-linguistic evidence suggests that certain speech sounds are associated with size, especially high front vowels with ‘small’ and low back vowels with ‘large’. However, empirical evidence that speech sounds are statistically associated with magnitude across words within a language has been mixed and open to methodological critique. Here, we used a random-forest analysis of a near-exhaustive set of English size adjectives (e.g.,tiny, gargantuan) to determine whether the English lexicon is characterized by size-symbolic patterns. We show that sound structure is highly predictive of semantic size in size adjectives, most strongly for the phonemes /ɪ/, /i/, /ɑ/, and /t/. In comparison, an analysis of a much larger set of more than 2,500 general vocabulary words rated for size finds no evidence for size sound symbolism, thereby suggesting that size sound symbolism is restricted to size adjectives. Our findings are the first demonstration that size sound symbolism is a statistical property of the English lexicon.

Assessing merged status with Pillai scores based on dynamic formant contours

When Pillai scores are used to study vowel mergers, formants are typically sampled from the midpoint. This study compares alternative methods for calculating Pillai scores: methods that incorporate dynamic spectral information. Eighteen speakers produced 20 tokens of Hodd and hawed. Formants were sampled at 20–35–50–65–80% duration. Seven Pillai scores were calculated, each based on a different subset of those samples with temporal pooling: (i) onsets, (ii) heads, (iii) midpoints, (iv) onsets + offsets, (v) heads + tails, (vi) onsets + midpoints + offsets, and (vii) all five. Subjects also completed a vowel identification task, and the rate of identifying one low-back vowel as the other was calculated. The results of the identification task were regressed on each Pillai score separately to identify the one with the highest correlation, through model selection. Dynamic formant contours performed better than static formant values, with midpoint sampling performing worst of all. Directions are discussed for basic research on Pillai scores in phonetics.

Perception of brazilian Portuguese open and close mid vowels by native Russian speakers

The perception of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) mid vowels is mainly investigated by foreign researchers who work with learners of Brazilian Portuguese, native speakers of English or Spanish. In Brazil, this field has been poorly explored. This work contributes to filling this gap by investigating the perception of two Brazilian Portuguese minimal vowel pairs in the group of 103 native Russian speakers and nine French speakers, most of them residing in Brazil. The test has been designed to evaluate the perception of the mid high and low front vowels [e] - [ε], and the mid high and low back vowels [o] - [ɔ]. The test is conducted online and includes 30 trials distributed in three types of tasks: image identification (8 trials), vowel identification (4) and word discrimination (18). It also contains a short sociolinguistic questionnaire. Our findings indicate that native Russian speakers do not differentiate the Brazilian Portuguese mid vowels very well: the mean percentage of the correct answers in the Russophone group was 68%, while in the French group it was 87% and in the Brazilian control group 99%. No correlation was found between the percentage of correct answers and residence time in Brazil or type of language instruction. As next steps, we plan to investigate the differentiation of the Brazilian Portuguese open and close mid vowels by Russophones at the level of production. We also intend to create a training corpus and develop strategies for perception training of the Brazilian Portuguese mid vowels, monitoring their efficiency at different time points.

Pivots of the Caribbean? Low-back vowels in eastern Caribbean English

AbstractResolving the convergence of low-back vowels in English constitutes a pivot with repercussions for the rest of the vowel system. We consider how speakers on an eastern Caribbean island co-opt the inherent variability of vowel systems to differentiate themselves. Examining the vowels of Bequia English (St. Vincent and the Grenadines) shows the main source of variation to lie in the position and duration of four low back vowels (cloth, lot, palm, thought), which do not act as the same pivot point for realignment of the vowel space as in North American English. The crucial distinction between transmission and diffusion lies at the heart of our findings: principles of language change derived from varieties characterized by transmission may differ from principles associated with histories of diffusion central to many contact and creole varieties.

Production and perception of two English vowels by advanced Colombian Spanish learners of English

This study investigates the acquisition of the English vowels [ae] and [ʌ] by Colombian learners of American English. Thirty speakers of Colombian Spanish residing in the United States participated in this study. A multiple-choice identification task demonstrated that participants were proficient at identifying [ae] and [ʌ], though the accuracy rate was somewhat lower than for a number of other English vowels used for comparison. When misidentified, [ae] and [ʌ] were most frequently confused with each other or with the low back vowel [ɑ]. In a production task completed by both bilingual Spanish speakers and monolingual English speakers, learners’ [ae] and [ʌ] were distinct from native monolingual English productions. The nature of the acoustic differences between native speakers’ vowels and learners’ vowels suggested that Colombian speakers’ English renditions of [ae] and [ʌ] were affected by their Spanish [a]. Further analysis revealed that learners’ [ae] was not statistically different from their own production of Spanish [a]. These results are compatible with the assumption emerging from previous research that speakers of Spanish acquiring English assimilate, to a varying degree, English low and low-mid vowels to Spanish [a]—a single vowel found in this area of the vowel space in Spanish.

Dutchified English in an Ohio Beachy Amish-Mennonite Community

This article compares the English spoken by Beachy Amish-Mennonites just outside the Holmes County, OH, plain community with the English of non-plain neighbors. Although there is no previous linguistic research about the Beachys in this region, previous research on the dialects of English spoken by Amish communities suggests that differences from regional standards are influenced by deliberate border maintenance, primacy of language in expressing ethnic identity, and interference from Pennsylvania German, known to speakers as “Dutchified English.” However, little research has examined the English of the Beachys, who, compared to the Amish, occupy a less conservative position between separation from and engagement with broader society. The variables I focus on are initial th-stopping, final obstruent devoicing, and the low back vowel merger. The first two variables are documented for Amish English and various German bilingual communities. Th-stopping is also socially salient and is associated with the more religiously orthodox Amish churches in Holmes County. I collected production and perception data from ten speakers in the Beachy congregation and five non-Anabaptist speakers from the same region, and I present here my findings of the use of th-stopping and final consonant devoicing, both of which are attested, although neither are used categorically, and the low back merger, which is attested categorically in all non-Anabaptists but in only one Beachy speaker. The perceptual data has theoretical implications for the role of community identity and border maintenance between non-plain neighbors and the heavily Amish Holmes County community.

Chapter 3: The Low Back Vowel(s)

Research Article| December 01 2018 Chapter 3: The Low Back Vowel(s) Publication of the American Dialect Society (2018) 103 (1): 43–64. https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-7318737 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Chapter 3: The Low Back Vowel(s). Publication of the American Dialect Society 1 December 2018; 103 (1): 43–64. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-7318737 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 SocietyThe Publication of the American Dialect Society Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2018 American Dialect Society2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: ARTICLE You do not currently have access to this content.

Patterns of the Mainstream Sound Change in a Liminal Region: Low Back Merger in Washington DC

This study investigates the low back vowel merger (lot-thought merger) of African American and European American speakers in Washington DC. The study aims to follow up with the previous investigation by Labov et al. (2006) on low back merger in DC, and investigate whether African American speakers in DC are participating in the merger, one of the majority-led sound changes. The study also examines the difference in low back vowel production between African Americans from a particular quadrant of the city, namely, Southeast (SE), and those from elsewhere in DC. Data are taken from forty sociolinguistic interviews with natives of DC. The vowels were analyzed acoustically, taking F1 and F2 measurements at three different points of a vowel. Both the F1 and the F2 dimensions of the low back vowels and the degree of overlap were examined. The degree of overlap was measured by calculating the Pillai score for each speaker, with duration and following environment taken into account. Results indicate that DC is conservatively participating in the merger, with European American speakers exhibiting higher degrees of overlap than African American speakers. An age effect is also observed, but only among African American speakers who are not from SE. The study further argues that the participation in the mainstream sound change by some African Americans can also be analyzed as convergence to the local white norm, and that this convergence is more likely to be carried out by African American speakers who are not from SE, a section of the city in which the contact between African American speakers and European American speakers is minimal.

Nonconvergence and Divergence in Bilingual Phonological and Phonetic Systems: Low Back Vowels in Moundridge Schweitzer German and English

This study explores the bilingual phonology of two heritage speakers of Moundridge Schweitzer German (msg) from Moundridge, Kansas. The speakers are descendants of Mennonite speakers of German who settled in the area around Moundridge, Kansas, in the 1870s. The production of Moundridge Schweitzer German /a/ and /ɔ/ and American English /a/ and /ɔ/ were compared and no evidence of phonological or phonetic convergence was found. For one speaker, there was evidence that phonetic realizations of /a/ and /ɔ/ in the two languages were diverging with a merger or a near merger of the two vowels in the heritage variety of German but not in English.