Sociophonetic Variation Research Articles

Dialect variation in formant dynamics: The acoustics of lateral and vowel sequences in Manchester and Liverpool English.

This study analyses the time-varying acoustics of laterals and their adjacent vowels in Manchester and Liverpool English. Generalized additive mixed-models (GAMMs) are used for quantifying time-varying formant data, which allows the modelling of non-linearities in acoustic time series while simultaneously modelling speaker and word level variability in the data. These models are compared to single time-point analyses of lateral and vowel targets in order to determine what analysing formant dynamics can tell about dialect variation in speech acoustics. The results show that lateral targets exhibit robust differences between some positional contexts and also between dialects, with smaller differences present in vowel targets. The time-varying analysis shows that dialect differences frequently occur globally across the lateral and adjacent vowels. These results suggest a complex relationship between lateral and vowel targets and their coarticulatory dynamics, which problematizes straightforward claims about the realization of laterals and their adjacent vowels. These findings are further discussed in terms of hypotheses about positional and sociophonetic variation. In doing so, the utility of GAMMs for analysing time-varying multi-segmental acoustic signals is demonstrated, and the significance of the results for accounts of English lateral typology is highlighted.

A large-scale smartphone-based sociophonetic study of Taiwan Mandarin

Abstract This study aims to (i) identify patterns of sociophonetic variation in Taiwan Mandarin, and (ii) evaluate smartphone technologies as a tool for crowdsourcing sociophonetic data. Specifically, this study examines both phonological variables found in prior literature to be highly salient (deretroflexion, labiovelar glide deletion), and variables that are less likely to index social properties (merging of final /n, ŋ/, changes to Tones 2 and 3). Unlike past studies which have primarily relied on smaller sample sizes, I utilize a smartphone application to crowdsource audio recordings across Taiwan; subsequent Rbrul analysis of 292 recordings revealed robust patterns of sociolinguistic variation. Deretroflexion correlates strongly with gender and age, while glide deletion correlates with gender. Nasal final merging and tonal change exhibit less socio-indexical variation, but provide evidence of potential change in progress. These findings suggest that smartphone-based crowdsourcing can complement traditional sociolinguistic fieldwork, and reveal new knowledge about large-scale variation.

¡Ya pué[h]! Perception of coda-/s/ weakening among L2 and heritage speakers in coastal Ecuador


 
 
 This investigation lies at the intersection of second language acquisition (SLA), sociophonetic variation, and speech perception. Specifically, it investigates the perception of coda /s/-aspiration (producing disco as [dih.ko]), a dialectal feature characteristic of Guayaquileño (coastal Ecuadorian) Spanish, among 14 young-adult English speakers who travel to Ecuador. The study investigates the participants’ ability to perceive an aspirated variant as a legitimate /s/ over time as they are further exposed to the local variety. It also explores the linguistic and extralinguistic factors that play a role in the perception of the variable such as phonological context of /s/, proficiency level, and individual differences in experience with /s/-weakening dialects. Results suggest that most learners are able to acquire new mappings within their interlanguage phonological system. However, results vary according to proficiency, phonological context of /s/, and at the individual level. The results also suggest that gains in sociolinguistic competence can be seen in terms of perception (as opposed to only in learner production), which underscores the necessity to include perceptual studies in future research in variationist SLA.
 
 

Acquisition of sociophonetic variation

Abstract This study investigates the acquisition of nativelike variation in the production of Spanish /d/ by English-speaking learners. Specifically, we examine the production of /d/ in word-internal intervocalic position in the speech of 13 highly advanced nonnative speakers (NNSs) and 13 native speakers (NSs) of Spanish in digitally-recorded sociolinguistic interviews. The analysis includes a discrete categorization of /d/ realization based on spectrographic examination (stop vs. spirant vs. deleted) and a continuous intensity difference measure. Tokens were coded for grammatical category, surrounding segments, stress, number of syllables, and lexical frequency. Results indicate that both NNSs and NSs exhibit /d/ spirantization and deletion, but these two processes are affected by different factors both between and across groups: NNS deletion patterns are predicted most significantly by lexical frequency, whereas degree of spirantization is influenced by articulatory/contextual factors of phonetic context and stress. NS patterns for both processes are influenced by most factors in a similar manner.

Priming as a Motivating Factor in Sociophonetic Variation and Change.

Understanding how and why pronunciations vary and change has been a dominant theme in variationist sociolinguistics (Labov, , ). Linguistic variability has also been an area of focus in psychology and cognitive science. Work from these two fields has shown that where variation exists in language, an alternative form, once used, persists in working memory and has a greater chance of reuse (Bock, ; Bock & Loebell, ; Branigan, Pickering, & Cleland, ). While there have been efforts to connect priming research with sociolinguistics at the level of grammar (Poplack, ; Travis, ), there has been less work which explicitly considers the potential role of priming as a motivating factor in accent variation and change. This paper explores the role of priming in a socially conditioned sound change. There are two main findings: (a) phonetic variants with the same voicing tend to cluster together in naturally occurring speech and (b) repetition of phonetic form interacts with widely attested sociolinguistic predictors of variation. I argue that there are benefits to both cognitive science and sociolinguistics from this synergy: Incorporating research from cognitive science into sociolinguistics provides us with a better understanding of the factors underpinning a sound change in progress; incorporating insights from sociolinguistics into cognitive science shows that priming does not always operate in the same way for all speakers.

Southern stops: Phonation type differences in Mississippi

While the voicing contrast between American English word-initial stops is often described as relatively uniform across speakers (e.g., voiced segments are produced with short positive VOTs while voiceless segments are produced with long positive VOTs), considerable sociophonetic variation exists. The current study investigates variation in the VOT of voiced and voiceless word-initial stops in pot, bot, tot, dot, cot, gotproduced in isolation and in carrier sentences. Participants included 40 native English speakers from Mississippi grouped according to their self-identified gender and ethnicity. As previously reported, African American speakers produced significantly more voiced stops with negative VOTs and more fully voiced closures preceding voiced stops than Caucasian American speakers. While speakers did not differ in their production of voiceless VOT when words were read in isolation, African American speakers maintained closure voicing preceding voiceless stops far more often than Caucasian American speakers. No gender differences were found. These data suggest this voicing variation is due to robust dialectal differences. The possibility that speakers who exhibit more prevoicing and more fully voiced closures are prolonging closure voicing through laryngeal lowering or nasal venting is explored through the examination of pitch and intensity trajectories within the closure and within the following vowel.

Sociophonetic variation in Mississippi: Gender, ethnicity, and prevoiced plosives

While native English speakers are traditionally reported to produce word-initial voiced plosives with short positive VOTs, recent studies suggest sociophonetic variation exists in the production of these sounds. In separate studies, more prevoicing has been reported for men than women, for African American speakers than Caucasian American speakers, and for southern American English speakers than speakers from other regions. The current study investigates the effects of gender, ethnicity, and context on voicing variation in Mississippi by analyzing word-initial /b, d, g/ as read in sentences by forty native speakers of English grouped according to self-reported gender and ethnicity. A significant effect of ethnicity and an interaction between gender and ethnicity were found. African American speakers produced voiced stops with a larger proportion of closure voicing and produced more fully voiced closures than Caucasian American speakers. While African American men and women produced similarly voiced closur...

Sociophonetic variation in a long‐term language contact situation: /l/‐darkening in Welsh‐English bilingual speech

This study investigates /l/‐darkening in the Welsh and English speech of bilinguals in North Wales. Although it is claimed that /l/ is dark in all syllable positions in northern varieties of both languages, there have been no quantitative investigations of this feature which consider cross‐linguistic phonetic differences, the differing nature of language contact between North East and North West Wales, and differences in the way both languages are acquired by speakers. The dataset of 32 Welsh‐English bilinguals, aged 16–18, was stratified by speaker sex, home language, and area. Tokens of /l/ in word‐initial onset and word‐final coda positions were analysed acoustically. The results show cross‐linguistic differences in onset position and that such differences were found to be greater in the speech of female speakers. Differences were also found between the two areas. These results are discussed with reference to the influence of extra‐linguistic factors on speech production and the possible social meaning associated with dark /l/.

Introduction: Tracing the origin of /s/ variation

AbstractThis paper provides an introduction to the papers in this special issue on the sociophonetics of /s/. We begin by reviewing some of the principal findings on variation in the production and perception of /s/, summarizing studies in sociolinguistics, experimental phonetics, and laboratory phonology. We go on to identify similarities in the meanings associated with /s/ variation cross-linguistically, and briefly describe how theories of sound symbolism may help us to account for these patterns. We conclude this introductory article with a summary of the contributions to the special issue and a discussion of how together these articles help us to better understand that origin and trajectory of socially meaningful sociophonetic variation.

Indexing Gay Identities in American Sign Language

A sociolinguistic style consists of a set of linguistic resources that carry specific meaning within a social context (Campbell-Kibler 2011). One such resource is the use of phonetic variants that do not change the denotative meaning of a word, but are different enough to be recognized as unique. This type of socially constrained phonetic variation has frequently been dismissed as being outside the realm of phonology. In this study, I examine the feasibility of using social variation to inform phonological theory. I present a study of sociophonetic variation in men who identify as members of the Deaf and gay communities in the San Francisco Bay Area. I propose that a linguistic style employed by some Deaf gay men includes frequent use of distal joints in the articulation of signs. I show how analysis of this style can both enhance our understanding of the phonological structure of sign language and also demonstrate how models of phonology can accommodate sociolinguistic variation. By recasting social variation as a meaningful and informative aspect of phonology, we may better understand how we perceive, acquire, and use phonological structure.

Bermudian English: An acoustic analysis of vowel properties with implications for sociophonetic variation

Bermudian English is a variety of interest due to its distinctiveness from most varieties of British and American English, but to date, few studies have documented the properties of the dialect's vocalic system (Ayers 1933). This study provides an initial description of the vowel systems of Bermudian English speakers, especially as compared to the systems of speakers of Mainstream U.S. English (MUSE). The study was conducted with seven native Bermudian speakers between the ages of 18 and 21. Subjects participated in a word list task as well as a picture task to elicit naturalistic speech. Results of regression analyses comparing F1, F2, and F3 values of Bermudian speakers with formant values of Mainstream U.S. English speakers from Hillenbrand (1995). indicate that Bermudian speakers differ from MUSE speakers in several striking ways. Bermudian speakers produce significantly fronter /u/ and /o/, and lower /i/ than MUSE speakers. Bermudian speakers also show a near complete merger of /ɛ/ and /ae/, though speakers also show some variation between productions in the word list vs. picture tasks, indicating a potential casual/careful distinction. Male Bermduian speakers also show a merger of /iɹ/ and /ɛɹ/ which is a stigmatized production according to speakers, though this does not occur for female speakers. The differences between casual/careful speech in front vowels and the gender differences in the production of prerhotic vowels provide valuable directions for future sociolinguistic and phonetic work on the variety.

The sociophonetics of rhotic variation in Sicilian dialects and Sicilian Italian: corpus, methodology and first results

SoPhISM (The SocioPhonetics of verbal Interaction: Sicilian Multimodal corpus) is an acoustic and articulatory sociophonetic corpus focused on whithin-speaker variation as a function of stylistic/communicative factors. The corpus is particularly intended for the study of rhotics as a sociolinguistic variable in the production of Sicilian speakers. Rhotics are analyzed according to the distinction between single-phase and multiple-phase rhotics along with the presence of constriction and aperture articulatory phases. Based on these parameters, the annotation protocol seeks to classify rhotic variants within a sufficiently granular, but internally consistent, phonetic perspective. The proposed descriptive parameters allow for the discussion of atypical realizations in terms of phonetic derivations (or simplifications) of typical closure–aperture sequences. The distribution of fricative variants in the speech repertoire of one speaker and his interlocutors shows the potential provided by SoPhISM for sociophonetic variation to be studied at the ‘micro’ level of individual speaker’s idiolects.

Sociophonetic variation of like in British dialects: effects of function, context and predictability

This study examines sociophonetic variation in different functions oflikeamong adolescents in London and Edinburgh. It attempts to determine the factors that may explain this variation. Our results suggest that the function oflikecorrelates primarily with contextual factors, rather than the phonetic factors of vowel quality, /l/ to vowel duration and /k/ realisation. In particular, the preceding and following segments and their bigram predictability emerge as highly significant, in addition to the boundary strength followinglike. In both London and Edinburgh, the vowel appears to be the only non-contextual feature that is sensitive to the function oflike: quotativebe likeis more likely to be monophthongised than other functions oflike. We argue that the more monophthongal nature of quotativelikeis due to the syntactic and prosodic context in which it occurs.

A sociophonetic account of morphophonemic variation in Palestinian Arabic

This study presents findings from sociolinguistic fieldwork on Palestinian Arabic in the Gaza Strip and Jordan. The sample includes 30 speakers representing three age groups, both genders, and three Palestinian communities: indigenous Gaza City residents, refugees from Jaffa who live in Gaza City, and Gaza City refugees living in Jordan. Linear mixed effects analyses are presented on the vowel raising of the Arabic feminine ending /ah/. The traditional dialect of Gaza realizes this morpheme consistently as [a] (Bergsträsser 1915), with all other Levantine city dialects raising the feminine ending to [e] or [i] except after back consonants (Al-Wer 2007). Similarly, the traditional Jordanian dialect in the area in which Gaza City refugees live also raises this vowel to [e] (Herin 2014). Results indicate robust sociophonetic variation in the realization of this vowel across these communities. Jaffa refugees in Gaza, whose traditional dialect realizes this vowel as [e], are found to be lowering their realization of this vowel with each successive generation, with younger speakers showing a phonetic realization similar to young indigenous Gazans. Simultaneously, Gaza refugees in Jordan show higher phonetic realizations across generations, indicating convergence toward the local realization of this vowel in Jordanian Arabic.

Variación sociofonética de las consonantes del castellano chileno [Sociophonetic variation in Chilean Spanish consonants

This paper explores the sociophonetic variation of the consonants of Chilean Spanish. It analyzes the socially-indexed allophones of /t???/, /t???/, /r/, /?/, /?/, /s/, /d?/, /?/, /f/, /l/ and /b/, and concludes that in the young generation, speakers of all social classes are adopting prestige allophones of /t???/ on a massive scale; that a process of sociolect leveling is affecting /t???/, /r/, /?/ and /?/, possibly under the influence of an exonorm in the case of /t???/ and /r/; that /s/ has developed new stigmatized allophones due to the operation of covert prestige; and that certain allophones of /s/ and /d?/ which were socially unmarked in the past are becoming stigmatized, likely as a result of hypercorrective use. It further concludes that /?/ is for all intents and purposes extinct, and that the stigmatized allophones of /f/ and /l/, as well as a non-stigmatized allophone of /b/, have been largely abandoned.

Variability in analyst decisions during the computation of numerical likelihood ratios

This study assesses the extent to which likelihood ratios (LRs) are affected by analyst decisions regarding the number of reference speakers, number of tokens per speaker, and degree of linguistic match between the suspect-offender and the reference data. Using F1 and F2 trajectories from spontaneous /u?/ vowels, LRs were computed against a reference set of up to 120 speakers, and between 2 and 13 tokens per speaker. LR scores proved robust when using more than 30 speakers, although validity improved as the sample size increased. Regional dialect mismatch was found to overestimate same-speaker scores by an average of one order of log10 magnitude. For different-speaker pairs, dialect mismatch generally resulted in more false hits. The results indicate that small amounts of reference data should generally be avoided, and that an awareness of the complexity of sociophonetic variation is essential in the definition of the relevant population for voice comparison.

36ͤ Festival International de Films de Femmes

Reviews 231 toward the target features and provides a wide selection of relevant practice activities. In addition to treating key phonetic elements that are common to all varieties of French (e.g., syllable stress, enchaînement), the authors have also opted to address a number of socio-phonetic variation phenomena (e.g., optional schwa deletion) raising students’ awareness to the fact that French is a highly diverse language which varies according to geographical, social, situational, and medial contexts of use. In addition, the content of each chapter is embedded in a cultural topic which will likely appeal to learners. However, from a sociolinguistic perspective, there are a few terminological issues with this textbook. The authors present français standard, français international, and français de référence as equals. Yet, work by Guérin informed by Koch and Oesterreicher clearly illustrates that standard French is only a situated realization of a national variety of French, one that is typically found in formal monological oral or written communicative situations. It is therefore inaccurate and misleading to refer to Swiss or Belgian French as instances of regional non-standard varieties. Moreover, to my knowledge, there is no consensual description of what constitutes français international. Lyche proposes a thorough phonological description of français de référence, which she based on a large amount of oral data collected for the ongoing research project Phonologie du français comtemporain (PFC). The authors’ operationalization of français standard thus appears to rest on their shared agreement of what phonetic features best describe that variety. In spite of this shortcoming, Sons et Sens is an invaluable pedagogical resource for French L2 classrooms. It will enrich students’ perspectives on the diversity and richness of modern French language and cultures. Université Laval Suzie Beaulieu Film edited by Michèle Bissière 36e Festival International de Films de Femmes, Créteil, 14–23 mars 2014. . Some of the most rewarding sides to the FIFF remain the pedagogical interactions with junior high and high school students.Once again,the high school group published the daily newsletter, What’s up, posted online during the festival. Their remarks and research were particularly valuable this year. Among the most pertinent and significant sections was the Colloque femmes et cinéma/Women in Films. It included“Statistiques et valorisation des femmes travaillant dans le secteur de l’audiovisuel”;“Mise en réseau, l’histoire et les meilleures pratiques”; “Introduction à l’analyse politique et au contenu/Genre et le cinéma des femmes.” This last presentation included Maria de Medeiros (featured in the Portraits section), Dominique Gros (a member of the documentary jury) and Kate Millett, continuing to inspire so many years after her seminal book, Sexual Politics. Her presence, her film (Three Lives, that follows three American women in the 1970s), and her remarks bridged the gap between American feminists in the 1960s and 1970s and modern French women. It was remarkable to watch twenty- and thirty-year-olds discover the work of their American predecessor/s and interact with it/them. Cinéast(e)s,the documentary by Julie Gayet and Mathieu Busson on French women filmmakers represented an impressive number of women interviewed (20), spanning generations, from the pioneers (such as Agnès Varda, who rightfully reminds us of the earliest pioneer, Alice Guy) to recent first time filmmakers. Those interviewed were: Varda,Balasko,Marshall,Bruni Tedeschi,Zlotowski,Donzelli,Sciamma,Delpy,HansenLove ,Achache,Azuelos, Doillon, Ferran, Garcia, Letourneur, Mazuy, Moreau, Nakache, Roüan. Gayet sets up the interviews with questions such as: Does the public listen to men more than to women? Can we speak of a strictly feminine cinema? Is it more difficult for a woman than for a man to find funding for a film? Are gender quotas necessary for film? And she does remind us that France is the country with the highest percentage of women filmmakers, although that number still remains around 20%. What she does not explore is why the percentage is higher. For example, she could have contemplated the possible impact of the feminization of the teaching staff at FEMIS; the inclusion of more women in the CNC that attributes l’avance...

Sons et sens: la prononciation du français en contexte par Anne Violin-Wigent, Jessica Miller, et Frédérique Grim

each chapter are filled with insightful comments, philosophical meanderings about the many dimensions of culture, different definitions of culture(s) and thoughts on the difficulties involved in becoming culturally literate. The book contains the following chapters: Introduction; Languages—Cultures—Globalization; Mother Culture— Foreign Culture; Words and Ways of Saying Things; Discourse and Interaction; Alterity and Imagination; Culture: Pedagogical Challenges; and Afterword. This reviewer would have preferred shorter, more tightly organized chapters with a clearer theme, given the multi-layered approach of the book and the many references that Szende uses and weaves into his discussions. In addition, the dense prose could have used substantial editing. For example, there are many instances where a series of quotes from books and articles are strung together with little or no commentary or explanation by Szende; more substantive commentary by the author to help distill these ideas and insights would add considerably to the quality of the book. This volume is not one filled with information about the many habits and customs of daily life or one that takes a sociological, political, or anthropological look at second language culture but it is instead a book that forefronts the primary role of language in establishing cultural connections. As Szende states, “If culture basically represents what one should see, believe, know and say, in order to behavior in an efficient and appropriate manner, and in accordance with the members of a community, language appears as the natural gateway to a culture” (40). In a short review, it is difficult to provide a résumé of the main ideas of a book as expansive as this one. However, Szende’s Afterword provides useful summary statements. For example, he states that “Culture is not limited to language, but it is largely expressed through the language that puts it in words” (382) and later cautions readers that “The cultural lends itself with difficulty to the exercise of inventory”(387).Thus,even if Szende did not provide concrete paths to the teaching of a second culture,he did offer overarching principles that can help a teacher, educator or researcher unpack the mysteries of how we learn and how we teach another’s culture. Ohio State University Diane W. Birckbichler Violin-Wigent, Anne, Jessica Miller, et Frédérique Grim. Sons et sens: la prononciation du français en contexte. Washington, DC: Georgetown UP, 2013. ISBN 978-1-58901-971-3. Pp. 386. $80. French second and foreign language (L2) instruction has traditionally been pervaded with the ideology of the standard (Étienne and Sax). However, the view that languages are dynamic and heterogeneous and should therefore be treated as such in instructed L2 settings is gaining widespread acceptance (Geeslin and Long). Sons et sens generally embraces this latter view and is thus very timely. From a pedagogical perspective, this textbook is extremely well designed. The Focus on FormS approach adopted in these 15 chapters is very effective at directing students’attentional resources 230 FRENCH REVIEW 89.1 Reviews 231 toward the target features and provides a wide selection of relevant practice activities. In addition to treating key phonetic elements that are common to all varieties of French (e.g., syllable stress, enchaînement), the authors have also opted to address a number of socio-phonetic variation phenomena (e.g., optional schwa deletion) raising students’ awareness to the fact that French is a highly diverse language which varies according to geographical, social, situational, and medial contexts of use. In addition, the content of each chapter is embedded in a cultural topic which will likely appeal to learners. However, from a sociolinguistic perspective, there are a few terminological issues with this textbook. The authors present français standard, français international, and français de référence as equals. Yet, work by Guérin informed by Koch and Oesterreicher clearly illustrates that standard French is only a situated realization of a national variety of French, one that is typically found in formal monological oral or written communicative situations. It is therefore inaccurate and misleading to refer to Swiss or Belgian French as instances of regional non-standard varieties. Moreover, to my knowledge, there is no consensual description of what constitutes français...

Voicing "Phono-Indexicals": On the Politics of Vocalic Variation in Metasemiosis

Research on reflexivity in communication has shown that speakers leverage a range of semiotic strategies to segment and characterize linguistic variability. My work explores how entextualization and intertextuality play key roles in dialogically managing interpretations of sociophonetic variability (cf. Schilling-Estes 1998). I examine how speakers “voice” and comment on vocalic variation by employing interrelated modes of metapragmatic typification, including eye-dialect spelling, (explicit) metapragmatic discourse, constructed dialogue (Tannen 1989), and parodic double-voicing (Bakhtin 1981; Sclafani 2009). These strategies prove indispensable to the metapragmatic framing of phono-indexicals because most phonetic features in speech become objects of metasemiotic activity by virtue of their realization in specific words and salient texts, which in turn serve as sign vehicles for vocalic variables and other “semiotic hitchhikers” (Mendoza-Denton 2011). Accordingly, our capacity to reflexively model the pragmatics of sociophonotic variables derives in large part from our ability to segment and evaluate the more metalinguistically-available structures in which these phono-indexicals occur. The case of /aw/ monophthongization in the speech of many young black women and men in Houston, Texas supports this position. Drawing on five years of ethnographic research at a public radio station in Houston, I consider how this pronunciation feature becomes tethered indexically to contested formulations of authenticity and indigineity by virtue of its occurrence in a locally-salient idiom, COMIN’ DINE ([kʌmn dãːn] “coming down”). This idiom has become an enregistered emblem of a street-savvy “gangsta” persona in the popular music of Houston-based hip hop cultures. In this music, recontextualized across globally-circulating media, the expression of COMIN’ DINE puts sociophonetic variation on display, rendering it available for metasemiotic negotiation through “Bakhtinian voicing” (Jaffe 2009).

The acquisition of newly emerging sociophonetic variation: /str-/ in American English

Eight children aged 4;1-8;1 and their primary caregivers participated in a study designed to evaluate their use of the onset cluster /str-/ in both read and conversational speech. The cluster is currently undergoing a reported sound change in many varieties of English, with the initial /s/ being retracted to [ʃ]. The study compared the initial fricative of the cluster in both the children and their mothers. Acoustic analysis was carried out in order to categorize tokens as either [s] or [ʃ] using spectral peak analysis. Results found that children as young as 5;1 were starting to exhibit the usage patterns of their mothers. The distribution of the novel variant suggests that the children may be learning this form via a process of lexical diffusion rather than by rule. Implications for the study of dialect acquisition and phonological acquisition in general are discussed.