Sociophonetic Variation Research Articles

Acquisition of Sociophonetic Variation in an EFL Context: Evidence from Production, Perception, and Awareness

Acquisition of Sociophonetic Variation in an <scp>EFL</scp> Context: Evidence from Production, Perception, and Awareness

Revisiting the sociophonetics of sexuality in spontaneous speech

This study surveys sociophonetic variation in sibilant and vowel production for 44 Bay Area English speakers. I focus on (i) whether sexual orientation is an independent predictor, or interacts with gender, and (ii) what the patterning of bi + (bisexual, pansexual, queer, etc.) and non-binary speakers adds to previous claims (e.g., Gaudio 1994, Pierrehumbert 2004, Willis 2023). All participants completed a Map Task in pairs; 37 participated in a sociolinguistic interview. Recordings were auto-transcribed, forced-aligned, and hand-checked. For /s ʃ z ʒ/, tokens under 0.05 sec, in /str/ clusters, and/or adjacent to another sibilant were excluded. Before getting COG and skew, 0.02 sec were subtracted from token edges and voicing was Hann band-filtered. For all vowels and sibilants, mean and midpoint f0 were taken, and F1-F4 for vowels (using the median of values at midpoint plus six surrounding timepoints). Results show sexual orientation alone is not a robust predictor of /s/ frontedness. Both gender and sexuality interacted with duration for /s/ frontedness and vowel f0; gender and sexuality also interacted to influence /ʃ/ frontedness and /z/ devoicing, as well as vowel space shape. These results imply that, when bi + and non-binary identities are incorporated, the phonetic indexation of sexual identity is not easily generalizable within orientation labels, at least for informal speech.

Sociophonetic variation in the alveolar lateral in Yami

Abstract This paper examines lateral (/l/) variation in Yami, an indigenous language of Orchid Island, Taiwan. New acoustic evidence on F2–F1 distance and duration shows that palatalized laterals [lj] in Yami are characterized by greater formant distance and longer duration. These acoustic correlates are influenced by a mixed bag of social and linguistic factors, indicating the need for a coordinated assessment of these factors. Results also suggest that in general, younger, less-rooted, and Mandarin-dominant speakers have a narrower formant distance and shorter duration, indicating a less palatal-like /l/ pronunciation. The loss of [lj] among these speakers may be linked to a rapidly changing linguistic ecology, which fuels cross-linguistic transfer from Mandarin, the language of communication with outsiders. Since [lj] only occurs in Yami, younger speakers may have converged towards Mandarin and predominantly use [l]s, leading to a restructuring process in Yami phonology.

Investigating (in)coherence in Tyneside English(es): sociophonetic variation spectrums of face, goat, price and mouth in the DECTE corpus

The present study investigates the co-occurrence of face, goat, price and mouth vocalic variants in the Tyneside Linguistic Survey (TLS, Strang, 1968). The analysis is based on the original fine-grained transcriptions of the TLS sociolinguistic interviews across a sample of 44 predominantly working-class speakers (men/women, older, middle-aged and teenagers). Multiple Factorial Analysis and cluster analysis were combined to identify sub-groupings in the variety based on the entirety of the transcriptions (consonants, stressed and reduced vowels), and to investigate coherence across these vocalic variants. The results point towards major gender and class effects with four clusters of speakers characterised by varying degrees of accentedness. Overall, lower-status women and slightly higher-status women distinguish themselves through distinct variant choices. Differences amongst men of either status can best be measured through the extent to which they use the traditional variants.

Sociophonetic Variation in Vowel Categorization of Australian English.

This study involves a perceptual categorization task for Australian English, designed to investigate regional and social variation in category boundaries between close-front vowel contrasts. Data are from four locations in southeast Australia. A total of 81 listeners from two listener groups took part: (a) so-called mainstream Australian English listeners from all four locations, and (b) L1 Aboriginal English listeners from one of the locations. Listeners heard front vowels /ɪ e æ/ arranged in 7-step continua presented at random. Varied phonetic contexts were analyzed, with a focus on coda /l/ because of a well-known prelateral merger of /e æ/ through mid-vowel lowering (e.g., celery-salary) reported to occur in some communities in this part of Australia. The results indicate that regional variation in Australian English is evident in perception. In particular, merging of /el/-/æl/ is shown to occur in the southernmost regions analyzed, but rarely in the northern regions of the geographical area under investigation. Aside from regional variation observed, age was also a factor in how participants responded to the task: older speakers had more merger than younger speakers in many locations, which is a new finding-previously, the merger was thought to be increasing in frequency over time, yet here we see this in only one location. Aboriginal English listeners also responded differently when compared with mainstream Australian English listeners. By analyzing the perception results across a variety of regional locations, with data from two different Australian social groups in the same location, this study adds a new dimension to our understanding of regional and social variations in Australian English.

Community and lifespan changes in music: Sociophonetic variation in Laurentian French

Previous studies on English have highlighted various instances where individual singers or small groups change which dialectal features appear in their music (e.g. Trudgill 1997; Beal 2009; Coupland 2011; Eberhardt &amp; Freeman 2015; Lyon 2019). Whereas corpus studies on music have the option between real-time or apparent-time analyses, most previous research on music has largely been conducted via case studies on change across a singer or group’s career (see Gibson in press a). Focusing on Laurentian French (also known as Quebec French or Canadian French), multiple singers may moderate dialectal traits in music due to their albums being released internationally, where the dialect faces stigma (Szlezák 2015). We further hypothesize that pop singers are especially sensitive to international norms and stigma because they are more likely to market abroad due to pop music’s greater international appeal (Grenier 1993). We examine non-lengthened high vowel laxing in closed final syllables (e.g. /vit/ [vɪt] vite ‘fast’; Dumas 1983), a process characteristic of Laurentian French that is categorical (Côté 2012) and nonstigmatized (Lappin 1982; Paradis &amp; Dolbec 1998; Reinke et al. 2006) within the dialect. We expand the study of dialectal traits in music beyond English by using a new corpus of 20 Québécois singers who sing in French and are of the Laurentian French dialect. Additionally, we analyze the patterning of groups of singers across their careers, rather than the patterning of a single singer, and analyze real-time change of groups as opposed to individuals

Using the Corpus of North American Spoken English to explore regional variation in millions of eɪ diphthongs

Increases in the quality of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems and forced alignment algorithms have opened up new horizons for the study of acoustic properties of naturalistic speech (Coto-Solano et al., 2021). This paper describes the procedures used for the automatic extraction and alignment of audio and ASR transcript excerpts containing eɪ diphthongs from the Corpus of North American Spoken English, a 1.3-billion-word corpus of geolocated ASR transcripts of videos uploaded to YouTube channels of local government entities. In total, more than 2 million eɪ tokens were extracted from naturalistic speech in over 2000 locations in the US and Canada. The pipeline utilizes python code to extract audio segments from the DASH manifest of YouTube videos, then feeds them together with the corresponding transcript excerpt to the Montreal Forced Aligner. Targeted segments are then filtered using functions in Parselmouth, a python port of Praat. Because the underlying corpus is searchable and words are annotated with timing information, the extraction procedure is suitable for retrieving acoustic data from a range of naturalistic speech configurations (for example from discussions of particular topics or in the context of specific utterance types such as questions or replies). The corpus contains a variety of speech genres, making it suitable for studies of geophonetic and sociophonetic variation, and pipelines can be constructed to target specific phenomenona in YouTube videos, depending on the underlying research question.

Incorporating a gender expansive perspective into speech science pedagogy

This talk challenges the assumption of a traditional gender binary in speech science pedagogy. We first define and operationalize notions of sex and gender as they relate to speech communication. We will broadly consider acoustic properties that relate to anatomical differences across humans (such as vocal tract length and vocal fold mass) and acoustic properties that relate to socio-phonetic variation. We challenge the notion that anatomical differences are the only source of speech variability across gender categories. We discuss problems in the literature related to how speakers and listeners are categorized (typically either as binary male/female or binary man/woman with the assumption of cisgender gender identity). We move beyond the binary assumption of the ways that “males” and “females” speak by demonstrating speakers’ agency in constructing linguistic styles that are rich in social information and that convey nuanced identities. We highlight the variability in listeners’ perception of speaker gender and consider potential sources of this variability. Attendees will be provided with instructional tools that incorporate gender diversity into the speech science curriculum and that can be used in classroom discussions and activities.

Kawa and the variable stopping of obstruents in Ende

Abstract This paper details a study investigating sociophonetic variation in Ende, a language spoken in Papua New Guinea. The study examines speech produced by 30 individuals, investigating what social and linguistic factors are linked with the variable alternation between stopped and affricated realizations of Ende retroflex obstruents [ʈ͡ʂ~ʈ] and [ɖ͡ʐ~ɖ]. Our analysis provides evidence that the obstruents in question are more likely to be realized as stops when they are voiced and when the speakers are orators. Orators are people who practice kawa, a long-standing practice whereby select individuals perform regular public orations. Among orators, the speaker’s age also appears to play a role in retroflex stopping. The link between the stop variant and social factors can be understood within the context of the distribution of power in the community, even in the absence of any explicit standard.

Sociophonetic Variation and Change in Heritage Languages: Lexical Effects in Heritage Italian Aspiration of Voiceless Stops.

In a previous study on voiceless stop aspiration in Heritage Calabrian Italian spoken in Toronto, we found that the transmission of a sociophonetic variable differed from cross-generational phonetic variation induced by increased contact with the majority language. Universal phonetic factors and the social characteristics of the speakers appeared to influence contact-induced variation much more straightforwardly than the transmission of the sociophonetic variable. In the current study, we investigate further, examining possible alternative explanations related to the lexical distribution of the aspiration phenomena. We test two alternative hypotheses, the first one predicting that the diffusion of a majority language's phonetic feature is frequency-driven while change in a sociophonetic feature is not (or not that regularly across generations), and the second one predicting that sociophonetic aspiration decreases across generations by being progressively more dependent on the frequency of lexical items. Our results show that sociophonetic aspiration resists lexicalization and applies to both frequent and infrequent words even in the speech of third-generation speakers. By contrast, the progressive introduction of contact-induced phonetic change is led by high-frequency words. These findings add to the complexity of heritage language phonology by suggesting that the pronunciation features of a heritage language can follow different fates depending on their sociolinguistic roles.

Tree bahk or 3.0 Bark: Linguistic identity and the sociophonetic variation of rhotics in Gullah Geechee

The current study examines the speech of a Gullah Geechee personality who exhibits conscious shifts between sociolinguistic “styles” when speaking for an outsider audience. Her conscious use of this style shifting indexes specific identities, some for extracommunity consumption and some for demarcation of Gullah Geechee community membership. This ability to shift between lectal levels indicates a high degree of metadiscursive awareness, which is often not shared by the overt prestige status quo. This co-occurrence of style-shifting alongside both a creole continuum and cline of postvocalic r-lessness shows that singular features can co-index larger patterns of sociophonetic and discursive identity formation.

The Effect of Language Contact on /tʃ/ Deaffrication in Spanish from the US–Mexico Borderland

This study examines the sociophonetic variation in the L1 speech of Spanish–English bilingual speakers living in the Ciudad Juárez, Mexico–El Paso, TX border metropolis. The purpose of this research is to analyze the sociolinguistic production of /ʧ/ deaffrication in U.S. Spanish, particularly, in simultaneous and sequential bilinguals. Based on the Revised Speech Learning Model (SLM-r), it was hypothesized that L1 production of /ʧ/ deaffrication can be significantly affected by the establishment of a new L2 phonetic category /ʃ/ in bilinguals. Interviews with forty-four adult participants, including fourteen first generation simultaneous bilinguals, twelve sequential bilinguals, and eighteen monolingual Spanish speakers were acoustically and auditorily analyzed. Participants were recorded while they performed two types of tasks: a formal (reading) and two semi-informal speech production tasks. Results showed that simultaneous and sequential bilinguals had a significantly lower realization of [ʃ] than monolinguals, suggesting that L1 sociolinguistic variability is influenced by contact with English. Results also indicate the significance of the preceding segment on the realization of the variable under study in monolingual speech, with preceding /a, n, r, l/ favoring the variation and preceding /s, e, i, o, u/ disfavoring it. Comparisons of the variation in monolingual and bilingual speech show that the sociolinguistic factors (preceding segment, sex, and age) that influence the variation in monolingual controls do not influence the variation in bilingual speech.

Sociophonetic variation among Asian Americans: The role of ethnicity and style

The present study examined sociophonetic variation in a small sample of Asian Americans in Boston, Massachusetts (N = 8; 4f, 4m; Mage = 23) representing four ethnic groups—Chinese, Filipino, Korean, and Vietnamese. Analyzing these speakers’ English production in tasks eliciting both casual and careful speech, we focused on four linguistic features comprising features observed in New England and in certain Asian American groups. Three features (L/R-CONFLATION, L-VOCALIZATION, and R-DELETION) were coded auditorily and one (LOW BACK RAISING of /ɑ/ to /ɔ/) acoustically; the dataset included approximately 1500 tokens of each feature, for a total of around 6000 tokens. Mixed-effects modeling results on the casual speech data indicated that Ethnicity was a significant predictor (p's &amp;lt; .05) of the occurrence of L-VOCALIZATION (M = 86.6% overall) and R-DELETION (M = 8.5%), but not of L/R-CONFLATION (which did not occur at all) or LOW BACK RAISING (which did not clearly occur in F1 or F2). Preliminary analysis of the careful speech data showed lower rates of L-VOCALIZATION (M = 70.0%) and R-DELETION (M = 1.5%) than in casual speech and, again, no occurrence of L/R-CONFLATION or LOW BACK RAISING. These findings reveal similarities and differences in speech production among ethnically diverse Asian Americans, point to a possible role of style, and highlight the need for further investigation of phonetic variation within this community.

Uneven success: automatic speech recognition and ethnicity-related dialects

Addressing racial bias in automatic speech recognition is an area of concern in fields associated with human-computer interaction. Research to date suggests that sociolinguistic variation, namely systematic sources of sociophonetic variation, has yet to be extensively exploited in acoustic model architectures. This paper reports a study that evaluates the performance of one ASR system for a multi-ethnic sample of speakers from the American Pacific Northwest (including Native American, African American, European American and ChicanX speakers). Using a sociophonetic approach to characterizing vocalic and consonantal variation, we ask which dialect features appear to be most challenging for our ASR system. We also ask which error types are particular to the four ethnic dialects sampled. Recordings of both conversational and read speech were coded for a common set of 18 sociophonetic variables with distinct phonetic profiles. Automatic transcription was achieved using CLOx, a custom-built ASR system created for sociolinguistic analysis. Normalized error frequency rates were compared across ethnic samples to evaluate CLOx performance. Nf error rates demonstrate clear differential performance in the ASR system, pointing to racial bias in system output. Specific predictions are made regarding approaches that might be taken to leverage sociophonetic knowledge to improve social dialect-recognition accuracy in ASR systems.

Acoustic Analysis of the Socio-phonetic Variation in the English Language Long Vowels

The present study investigates the variation in the long English vowels among native English speakers and non-native Pakistani speakers of the English language. The recordings have been collected through e-mail from different regional speakers of Pakistani languages, from U.K. and the U.S., using social-networking. The analysis of the recordings is done using PRAAT software. The long vowel /i:/ was delimited for the study. Durations quoted by the renowned phonetician Danial Jones (1976), were used as a reference for the native speakers of the English language. The initial hypotheses were built to analyze the data. The study reveals that native speakers tend to follow the pattern introduced by Danial Jones with just a slight idiolectal difference. The non-native Pakistani speakers differentiate themselves in the duration of long vowels from the native speakers. Female native speakers have shown significant variation when compared with male native speakers.

Sociophonetic variation in English /l/ in the child-directed speech of English-Malay bilinguals

Three realisations of syllable-final /l/ have been described in previous work on Singapore English: vocalised-l (or deleted-l in some phonetic contexts; the local norms), dark-l (a form associated with the exonormative standards), and clear-l (a Malay-derived phonetic trait observed in the speech of some English-Malay bilinguals). This study examined whether, how and why Singaporean English-Malay bilinguals vary their English /l/ in their child-directed speech, and whether the phonetic variation, if any, could be socially-conditioned. The laterals in the English child-directed speech of ten father-mother dyads with their preschoolers were analysed using auditory and acoustic methods. All participants were simultaneous or early English-Malay bilinguals. The findings revealed that in informal contexts, both mothers and fathers used a relatively clearer /l/ in all syllable positions. Contrastingly, in formal contexts that involved teaching and learning, the coda laterals of mothers were significantly darker, thereby exhibiting positional contrast between onset and coda laterals. They also produced significantly more vocalised-l in these contexts. Fathers, however, did not show differentiation in the darkness of the laterals, nor did their laterals show significant positional differences in formal contexts, although some fathers of younger children did produce more vocalised-l than they did in informal contexts. The variation observed was discussed by exploring the potential socio-indexical meanings of these variants of /l/ within the context of variationist accounts of Singapore English and by drawing parallels with socially-conditioned variation in bilectal monolinguals and ethnolect speakers. Differences between maternal and paternal CDS patterns could be attributed to gender roles and cultural expectations of mothers’ dominant role in child-rearing, and may also be a result of and enabled by Malay women’s potentially more complex repertoire range.

The Trini Sing-Song: Sociophonetic variation in Trinidadian English prosody and differences to other varieties.

The current study provides a phonetic perspective on the questions of whether a high degree of variability in pitch may be considered a characteristic, endonormative feature of Trinidadian English (TrinE) at the level of speech production and contribute to what is popularly described as 'sing-song' prosody. Based on read and spontaneous data from 111 speakers, we analyze pitch level, range, and dynamism in TrinE in comparison to Southern Standard British (BrE) and Educated Indian English (IndE) and investigate sociophonetic variation in TrinE prosody with a view to these global F0 parameters. Our findings suggest that a large pitch range could potentially be considered an endonormative feature of TrinE that distinguishes it from other varieties (BrE and IndE), at least in spontaneous speech. More importantly, however, it is shown that a high degree of pitch variation in terms of range and dynamism is not as much characteristic of TrinE as a whole as it is of female Trinidadian speakers. An important finding of this study is that pitch variation patterns are not homogenous in TrinE, but systematically sociolinguistically conditioned across gender, age, and ethnic groups, and rural and urban speakers. The findings thus reveal that there is a considerable degree of systematic local differentiation in TrinE prosody. On a more general level, the findings may be taken to indicate that endonormative tendencies and sociolinguistic differentiation in TrinE prosody are interlinked.

The sociolinguistics of /l/ in Manchester

Abstract This paper presents a study of sociophonetic variation in the lateral approximant /l/ in Manchester, UK. We know little about how English laterals pattern sociolinguistically, despite them having been subject to extensive investigation in the phonetic literature. We present acoustic measures taken from interviews with 96 speakers from the city, stratified across five socioeconomic classes, spanning 99 years of birthdates (1907–2006). We demonstrate that word-initial /l/ is becoming darker in apparent time: younger speakers have darker /l/s. There is, however, no evidence that the allophonic status of /l/ is changing, with /l/ in all positions becoming darker. There is a monotonic relationship with social class: the higher the social class, the lighter the /l/, with some middle-class speakers showing potential of an allophonic distribution. We find an effect of ethnicity, with white speakers having darker /l/s in comparison to Black and Pakistani Mancunians. Overall, our findings are a novel contribution to the understanding of the sociophonetics of English laterals and provide new evidence of social patterning and the allophonic status of /l/ in this variety.

MELODIC PECULIARITIES OF REGIONAL DIALECT REPRESENTATIVES’ SPEECH

The article is performed in the framework of modern sociophonetics. Functioning of English in Scotland is characterized by correlation of regional pronouncing norm, dialects of Scots and also Gaelic language. In bilingual situation, interference of language system led to appearance of the majority of mixed language forms. The given article deals with the attempt to reveal in Glasgo informants nonformal spontaneous speech of the two age group representatives prosodic markers of their speech behavior. Emphasized during the analysis age prosodic peculiarities of the Scots speech behavior revealed characteristic differentiating features of each investigated group. Differentiating features of the Glasgo speech dialect age group 55-65 years, male representatives are the following: fractional syntagmatic devision, prevalence of High Head and Rising terminal tone of the final intonational group. Typical speech behavior age group 19-20 years, male college students is a highly fractional delimitation of speech and usage of emphatic terminal tones, which on the background of narrow voice range create the effect of emotionally neutral speech. Specific peculiarity of Scotish dialect speakers is the usage of low unstressed pre head in combination with high rising nuclear syllable and rising level of unstressed tail. Thus, taking into account the conducted analysis we may state that elements of urban speech style most vividly presented in the youth speech, on the background of emotionally colored prosodic models usage. The results of the perceptive analyses will support further study of sociophonetic variation of the Scottish speech.

From categories to gradience: Auto-coding sociophonetic variation with random forests

The time-consuming nature of coding sociophonetic variables that are typically treated as categorical represents an impediment to addressing research questions around these variables that require large volumes of data. In this paper, we apply a machine learning method, random forest classification (Breiman, 2001), to automate coding (categorical prediction) of two English sociophonetic variables traditionally treated as categorical, non-prevocalic /r/ and word-medial intervocalic /t/, based on tokens’ acoustic signatures. We found good performance for binary classifiers of non-prevocalic /r/ (Absent versus Present) and medial /t/ (Voiced versus Voiceless), but not for medial /t/ with a six-way coding distinction (largely due to some codes being sparsely represented in the training data). This method also yields rankings of acoustic measures in terms of importance in classification. Beyond any individual measures, this method generates probabilistic predictions of variation (classifier probabilities) that represent a composite of the acoustic cues fed into the model. In a listening experiment, we found that not only did classifier probabilities significantly capture gradience in trained listeners’ perceptions of rhoticity, they better predicted listeners’ perceptions than individual acoustic measures. This method thus represents a new approach to reconciling the categorical and continuous dimensions of sociophonetic variation.