Middle-aged Speakers Research Articles

Tapped /r/ in RP: a corpus-based sociophonetic study across the twentieth century

Abstract This paper aims to explore the use of the tap allophone [ɾ] in Received Pronunciation (RP) in word-internal and linking /r/ contexts over three decades (1940s–1960s) and considering three age cohorts (<35 years old, 35–54 years old, and ≥55 years old). A spoken corpus of formal register materials was compiled to conduct further perceptual and acoustic analysis and classify the articulation of /r/ into tap versus no tap. Results show a decreasing tendency of tap production across decades, and the initial stage of its replacement by the approximant variant. From a sociolinguistic perspective, tapped /r/ may have potentially changed its status, from an indicator to a marker. The fact that the tap allophone has become a sociolinguistic marker can encourage future research on intra-speaker variation. Women and middle-aged speakers (35–54 years old) are the ones leading this sound change, opting for the innovative approximant. This may be due to professional pressures or aspects of social identity, yet further research is needed. Furthermore, the word-internal context seems to favour the production of taps, which could be due to the general low frequency of linking /r/ and the formal register of the materials.

The effects of lexical frequency and homophone neighborhood density on incomplete tonal neutralization.

We investigated the effects of lexical frequency and homophone neighborhood density on the acoustic realization of two neutralizing falling tones in Dalian Mandarin Chinese. Monosyllabic morphemes containing the target tones (Tone 1 and Tone 4) were produced by 60 native speakers from two generations (middle-aged vs. young). The duration of tone-bearing syllable rhymes, as well as the F0 curves and velocity profiles of the lexical tones were quantitatively analyzed via linear mixed-effects modeling and functional data analysis. Results showed no durational difference between T1 and T4. However, the F0 contours of the two falling tones were incompletely neutralized for both young and middle-aged speakers. Lexical frequency showed little effect on the incomplete tonal neutralization; there were significant differences in the turning point of the two falling tones in syllables with both high and low lexical frequency. However, homophone neighborhood density showed an effect on the incomplete neutralization between the two falling tones, reflected in significant differences in the slope and turning point of the F0 velocity profiles between the two tones carried by syllables with low density but not with high density. Moreover, homophone neighborhood density also affected the duration, the turning point of F0 curves, and velocity profiles of the T1- and T4-syllables. These results are discussed with consideration of social phonetic variations, the theory of Hypo- and Hyper-articulation (H&H), the Neighborhood Activation Model, and communication-based information-theoretic accounts. Collectively, these results broaden our understanding of the effects that lexical properties have on the acoustic details of lexical tone production and tonal sound changes.

Code-Mixing in the Conversation of Northern Khmer Speakers in Thailand: A Case Study of Teenagers and Middle-Aged Northern Khmer Speakers in Buriram Province

This study aims to examine the linguistic performance of code-mixing by Northern Khmer (NK) teenagers in Buriram Province while conversing with NK middle-aged speakers in their community. It focuses on types of linguistic units or categories of code-mixing that occur in NK conversation and also on the various situations in which that linguistic unit occurs. It is found that code-mixing between NK and the Thai language occurs on three linguistic levels: morphological, syntactic, and discourse. On the morphological level, 7 categories of Thai words are found: noun, verb, adjective, final particle, quantifier, conjunction, and exclamation word. Three types of code-mixing are found on the syntactic level: Inter-Sentential, Intra-Sentential, and Extra-Sentential Code-Mixing. On the discourse level, code-mixing occurs in the middle and at the end of the NK discourse. There are 6 different situations in NK conversations where these types of code-mixing occur: (1) Greetings (2) Expressing appreciation (3) Expressions of politeness (4) Telling information (General and Specific) (5) Indicative mood, Lexical meaning, and Sentence structure, and (6) English loan words further borrowed from the Thai language. It is also found that NK speakers adopt the morphological processes of reduplication, the sentential structure, and serial verb construction when utilizing the Thai language to mix in their NK word formation and NK sentence structure. Lastly, NK speakers borrow English loanwords from Thai, instead of borrowing them directly from English.

Enregisterment eines /r/-Allophons?

In the study presented in this paper the use of a specific linguistic non-standard feature of German by 100 speakers representing three generations was analysed. The speakers originate from 25 different locations within the Middle Franconian dialect formation covering the middle-western parts of Germany. The feature analysed is the realisation of the Standard German phoneme /r/ as a voiceless velar or uvular fricative [x, χ] when following a short vowel and preceding a coronal obstruent. The comparison of how frequently the speakers use [χ] in different communicative contexts results in the observation of three types of speakers (i. e., [χ] users): The first type are dialect speakers mostly of the older generation (60 years and above) who use the variant in a traditional manner, namely when aiming at producing their best way to pronounce Standard German. According to these speakers [χ] forms part of the Standard German pronunciation norm. The second type is mainly represented by middle aged speakers (45–55 years) who use the feature in nearly all communicative contexts except when they have a dialect competency and are asked to produce their “strongest dialect”. Finally, the third type of speakers are mainly young people (17–23 years) who do not have any dialect competence. These speakers only use [χ] when they are asked to produce their “strongest dialect” and/or when they are talking to friends. On the basis of these results it is argued that, between these types of speakers and the generations they represent, a re-evaluation of the feature has taken place that may be classified as enregisterment, because speakers of the third type seem to use [χ] indexically in order to signal familiarity with their interlocutors on a interpersonal-social level.

Up north there: Discourse-pragmatic deixis in Northern Ontario

In this paper we analyze the discourse-pragmatic use of the adverbs there/here, e.g., “So, our grandsonthereis a real mixture”, in four small northern Ontario towns. 1200 examples contrasted by type of reference, ambiguous locative or non-locative, were coded for social and linguistic factors and analysed using statistical modelling. The results reveal that the strongest predictor of discourse-pragmatic use is date of birth: middle-aged speakers use it most in each town, but no other social factors (e.g. perceived gender, education, job type) are significant. Importantly, the higher the proportion of Francophone populations in the community, the greater the use of there but not here. We argue that alignment between Francophones and Anglophones is a likely explanation. More generally this study highlights the value of discourse-pragmatic features for understanding styles of interaction and underscores the research potential for comparing these phenomena across communities.

Grammatical convergence or microvariation? Subject doubling in English in a French dominant town

In French, subject doubling is “quite common” (e.g. Nadasdi 1995, Auger 1998, Thibault 1983, Zahler 2014) but in English it is rare (Southard & Muller 1998). Yet when anglophones speak French, they use subject doubling with French patterns (Nagy et al. 2003). In this paper, we analyze subject doubling in English in a bilingual French-English town. Usinga large corpus and statistical modelling, we show that thereis no difference between language groups, and neither sex, education nor job type are significant. The nature of the subject is the major predictor of doubling and there is a significant decrease among middle-aged speakers, suggesting mid-life social pressures on vernacular norms. Although subject doubling is low frequency, it is not stable across generations in the different language origin groups. While subject doubling may be a feature of vernacular dialects more generally, involving marking focus or topic marking as reported in other languages, in Kapuskasing when anglophones use it, they are accommodating to French patterns.

Normative Nasalance Scores for Middle-Aged and Elderly Speakers of Brazilian Portuguese

Objectives: This study establishes normative nasalance values for middle-aged and elderly Brazilian Portuguese-speakers and investigates age and gender effects across the life span. Methods: Nasalance scores were obtained from 62 middle-aged (45–59 years) and 60 elderly (60–79 years) participants with normal speech for 3 nonnasal, 1 phonetically balanced, and 2 nasal-loaded test sentences using the Nasometer II 6400. The data were combined with a published data set of 237 speakers in 4 groups: children (5–9 years), adolescents (10–19 years), young adults (20–24 years), and mature adults (25–35 years). A repeated-measures analysis of variance was used to investigate differences between the stimuli by gender and age groups. Results: There were statistically significant effects of stimulus, gender, and age group, as well as a stimulus-age group interaction effect and a gender-age group interaction effect. The females’ mean nasalance scores were higher than those of the males. The mean nasalance scores for the child, adolescent, and young and mature adult speakers were significantly lower than those for the elderly speakers, and the children’s scores were significantly lower than those of the middle-aged speakers. Conclusion: Higher nasalance scores among middle-aged and elderly speakers may indicate physiological changes affecting oral-nasal balance in speech across the life span.

Cross-dialectal analysis of English pitch range in male voices and its influence on aesthetic judgments of speech

AbstractThis study focuses on the differences in pitch register and pitch span across five accents of English, and investigates their potential effects on judgements of speech. We recorded two male middle-aged speakers for each of the following accents of English: Brighton, Manchester, Perth, New Jersey and Edmonton. Then, we modified pitch register in selected spontaneous speech recordings by raising the overall pitch in the recordings by 5 Hz and 15 Hz using Praat. The entire material was then randomized and prepared for an online survey. A group of 50 respondents (30 female, 20 male) who were non-native speakers of English were asked in a blind study to evaluate both the unmodified and modified recordings on a 7-point Likert scale in terms of their perceived attractiveness, friendliness, prestige and self-confidence. Overall, it has been found that pitch span can be a telling cue when evaluating perceived friendliness for both gender groups, while pitch register can affect male listeners in evaluating attractiveness and self-confidence. Finally, it seems that there is a an upper limit for what listeners can aesthetically accept in terms of pitch register, as the recordings with highest registers were disfavored by our respondents.

Cognitive and geographic constraints on morphosyntactic variation

AbstractIn this paper, I examine whether the variation patterns ofhaberpluralization (e.g.,hubo/hubieron fiestas‘there was/were parties’) in Peninsular Spanish corroborate the hypothesis elaborated in earlier work that the phenomenon constitutes a competition between two variants of the presentational construction withhaberthat is constrained by domain-general cognitive constraints on spreading activation. In addition, this paper examines whetherhaberpluralization is incrementing in frequency in particular Peninsular regions and whether or not the phenomenon is spreading geographically. To meet these objectives, I analyze a dataset of more than 7,500 cases ofhaber + plural NP, which were culled from two publicly available data sources: theCorpus Oral y Sonoro del Español Rural(which represents only rural speakers born before the 1940s;Fernández-Ordóñez 2005-) andTwitter(which represents mainly young and middle-aged speakers). The results of a mixed-effects logistic regression analysis that tests the effects of tense, the absence/presence of negation, typical action-chain position of the noun, the regional origin of the examples, and the data sources support the competition hypothesis. This model also supports that pluralizedhaberis spreading westward from its epicenters (Valencia, Barcelona, and Murcia), while also incrementing in frequency in northern, eastern and southern Spain. However, its frequency appears to be declining in central Spain. A geographically more detailed, but similar picture is obtained with three generalized additive mixed models that test the effects of geography on the total dataset as well as on each of the two subcorpora.

The Frequency of Expressions and Proverbs in Different Iranian Generations' Speech Styles

Change is one of the fundamentals of every language. Every community consists of different generations with various perspectives toward life. The difference among different generations’ vernaculars are so drastic that it would not be an exaggeration to claim that every generation of a society or a speech community has its own language or vernacular which distinguishes it from other generations or age-groups of the society in lexico-grammatical terms. This study put the frequency of expressions and proverbs in different generations' speech styles under investigation. Hence, inspired by stratified randomization technique, the researcher randomly selected a group of 24 middle-aged and similarly a group of 24 teenager participants of the two genders. Each of the age-groups consisted of 12 male and 12 female subjects in order to provide the possibility to determine the role of gender on expression or proverb usage. All the subjects were individually interviewed for elicitation of the needed data then their sentences were recorded and accurately transcribed for further investigation. By counting the expressions or proverbs in sentences of male/female teenagers' and middle-aged subjects of the research, their expression and proverb usage frequencies were illuminated. The study's results suggested that middle-aged speakers of Iranian community employed expressions and proverbs more than teenagers. This implies that the older would have a stronger relationship with the literature and are more satisfied with their culture and identity. Middle-aged subjects used those expressions which were deeply rooted in the literature and culture while teenagers were highly in use of those expressions and proverbs which were suddenly entered into the lexicon of the society by the advent of new television series or expanded advertisements of mass media, for example. Furthermore, it was found that males generally were more interested in using expression and proverb in their daily conversations than females.

Frequency of Subjunctive Use in Oral Production in Two Varieties of Spanish

Abstract This research establishes an analysis of mood use in semi-spontaneous oral production in two varieties of Spanish. A total of 104 adult monolingual native speakers of Spanish participated in the study (N=56 from Rosario, Argentina and N=48 from Toledo, Spain). Data were collected by means of a guided oral elicitation task. Results indicated vitality of subjunctive use among older speakers (51-73 years old) in both regions. However, non-subjunctive forms were more frequent among younger speakers (18-30 years old) in Rosario, while speakers in Toledo still favored the use of present subjunctive. This tendency was also evident in middle-aged speakers. Overall, reduction of present subjunctive use among younger generations is more notorious in Rosario while subjunctive use appears more robust in Toledo.

Phonetic variation in Scottish Gaelic laterals

This paper is an acoustic investigation of laterals in contemporary Scottish Gaelic. Scottish Gaelic is described as having three phonemic laterals /l̪ˠ l̪ʲ l/, which have previously been the subject of small-scale acoustic and static palatographic work. I expand on previous acoustic studies, including static and dynamic formant measures, and consider data from the diverse contemporary Gaelic-speaking population including [1] older speakers in a Gaelic-heartland area, [2] middle-aged speakers living in Glasgow, [3] adolescent speakers in immersion education in a heartland area, [4] adolescents in immersion education in Glasgow. Results suggest overall maintenance of the triple lateral system, but with substantial variation in the production of (phonemically) palatalised laterals in particular, which some young Glaswegians do not produce. These results are discussed with reference to language change in language revitalisation contexts, language contact, and modes of acquisition in revitalisation contexts.

Spanish variable direct object marking

In studying the social conditioning of Differential Object Marking (DOM) in Spanish we show a social dimension underlying the variable use of DOM: age of speakers has a moderate but significant effect, with middle-aged speakers showing an increase in overt marking. Previously, the implicit consensus was that there is no sociolectal variation in DOM. To ensure the statistical validity of our results, we developed an original, rigorous, quantitative approach to correct for the unbalanced distribution of the data across factor groups. A problem that has been frequently mentioned in the specialized literature, but never satisfactorily resolved for the linguistic analysis of corpus data.

Variation in discourse markers in the speech of Bucaramanga, Colombia

A linguistic approach to the study of discourse markers in the speech of the city of Bucaramanga (Colombia) shows a direct correlation between the use of such linguistic units and the age of the speaker. A 2002 study concluded that the younger population preferred markers such as pues (roughly meaning well or so) and o sea (that is), while entonces (then) identified the older group. The middle-aged speakers showed similar rates of preference in the use of both markers. A second study conducted in the year 2011 demonstrated that this speech community was reanalyzing the system of discourse markers. The younger population seemed to favor the use of entonces and pues, and to display a tendency towards the abandonment of expressions such as o sea and the interrogative tag ¿bueno? (place marker to confirm understanding) that identified this group at the beginning of the decade. The variation of discourse markers shows the dynamism of language and the importance of sociolinguistic factors as the trigger of this variability.

Discourse Functions of -Ketun and -Tela in Spoken Korean

This paper aims to examine the discourse functions of sentence-ending suffixes -ketun and -tela by looking at their interaction in modern spoken Korean. The data consists of 10 narrative corpora, collected in 2001 as part of ‘the Seoul Dialect Project’ by the National Institute of Korean Language, and 91 spoken corpora, made public by ‘the 21st Century Sejong Project.’ The narrative corpora include 10 middle-aged speakers from the Seoul region talking about their childhood. The spoken corpora include 40 monologues, 35 everyday conversations, five telephone conversations, and 11 thematic discussions. The results show that the -ketun and -tela sequences are usually used by a single speaker, and the -ketun to -tela sequence is more common than the other way around. A close examination of -ketun to -tela sequences shows that -ketun marks the background or setting for what the speaker is trying to say, which is marked by the following -tela. On the other hand, -tela to -ketun sequences show that -tela marks the speaker’s observation, which is followed by -ketun marking its cause or reason. It seems that -tela usually marks the speaker’s focus because of the unexpectedness or surprise element in its inherent meaning. Overall, it seems that the results of this study confirm those by previous studies on them by examining their interaction in spoken discourse.

The Effects of Aging on Acoustic Parameters of Voice

Background/Aims: There are no studies of the phonatory parameters of elderly Iranian speakers. The purpose of this study was to obtain normative acoustic data for a group of elderly Iranian male and female speakers over 70 years of age. Four selected acoustic parameters [fundamental frequency (F0), jitter, shimmer, and harmonics-to-noise ratio] were obtained and compared to a group of young and middle-aged speakers. Methods: Subjects were 21 Iranian elderly men and 20 Iranian elderly women. The age range for both male (mean ± SD: 77.09 ± 5.84) and female subjects (77.55 ± 4.34) was 70–90 years. The control group consisted of 40 Iranian young and middle-aged adults who were 20–49 years old (20 men and 20 women). The age range for the females was 23–40 years (30 ± 4.76) and for the males it was 21–49 years (30.1 ± 8.51). Each subject phonated 5/a/vowels with constant pitch and loudness for at least 5 s. The mid 3-second portion of the tokens was analyzed using the Dr. Speech 4.3u software (subprogram: Vocal Assessment; Dr. Speech, Tiger Electronics, Seattle, Wash., USA). Results: F0 was greater for elderly males than for young and middle-aged males. Conversely, F0 was greater for young and middle-aged females than for elderly females. Average shimmer was significantly higher in elderly males than in elderly females. Likewise, jitter was significantly higher in elderly males than in elderly females. Both shimmer and jitter were significantly greater in elderly speakers than in the young and middle-aged speakers. In addition, the harmonics-to-noise ratio was significantly greater for young and middle-aged males and females than for elderly males and females. Conclusions: The results of this study indicate that elderly Iranian speakers had significantly greater vocal instability than young and middle-aged Iranian adults, as measured by the selected acoustic parameters. As the elderly population in Iran and the world continues to increase rapidly, studies of this kind are needed for researchers, educators, and practitioners to better understand the effects of aging on all aspects of human speech-language communication. Voice is an important factor for communication, and its change with age alters the communication process.

“Brainwash from English”?: Barunga Kriol Speakers’ Views on Their Own Language

This article deals with the sociolinguistics of Kriol, an English-lexifier creole widely used among Aboriginal people in the north of the Northern Territory in Australia. Some views and ideologies about their own language expressed by four first-language Barunga Kriol speakers in a series of speech interactions are presented, and possible interpretations are suggested, based on understanding of speakers’ local and personal backgrounds as well as sociolinguistic and historical clues. While the youngest speaker was somewhat critical of Kriol, older and middle-aged speakers expressed affection and pride for it, even though their depiction of Kriol as “in between” English and traditional Aboriginal languages was in line with the youngest speaker’s views. One must be cautious about drawing general conclusions from such a small number of cases, but two possible factors triggering the discrepant evaluations may be the older speakers’ greater awareness of the history of Kriol and of its recognition as a respectable language and their mastery of ancestral Aboriginal languages.

Castilian Spanish

Spanish is by far the most widely spoken Romance language, used by about 350 million people mainly in the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America. The language variety described below is formal Spanish spoken in Castile (Central Spain) by educated middle-aged speakers.

Disfluency rates in conversation: effects of age, relationship, topic, role, and gender.

After reviewing situational and demographic factors that have been argued to affect speakers' disfluency rates, we examined disfluency rates in a corpus of task-oriented conversations (Schober & Carstensen, 2001 ) with variables that might affect fluency rates. These factors included: speakers' ages (young, middle-aged, and older), task roles (director vs. matcher in a referential communication task), difficulty of topic domain (abstract geometric figures vs. photographs of children), relationships between speakers (married vs. strangers), and gender (each pair consisted of a man and a woman). Older speakers produced only slightly higher disfluency rates than young and middle-aged speakers. Overall, disfluency rates were higher both when speakers acted as directors and when they discussed abstract figures, confirming that disfluencies are associated with an increase in planning difficulty. However, fillers (such as uh) were distributed somewhat differently than repeats or restarts, supporting the idea that fillers may be a resource for or a consequence of interpersonal coordination.

Phonational profiles of male trained singers and nonsingers

The purpose of this study was to compare the mean speaking fundamental frequency (SFF), speaking frequency range, and mean speaking intensity for a group of trained male singers and a group of age-matched non-singers in three age ranges: 20 to 35 years old; 40 to 55 years old; and older than 65 years. Each subject was recorded as he read "The Rainbow Passage" and produced the vowel /a/ to the limits of his phonational frequency range. The data indicated that the mean SFF of the nonsingers was significantly lower among the middle-aged speakers than with the young or elderly. In contrast, the tenors exhibited no age-related SFF trends, and the young bass/baritones exhibited lower SFF levels than the middle-aged or elderly. The elderly nonsingers produced frequency ranges that were smaller than any other group. Finally, the young nonsingers used greater speech intensity than did the other groups.