Vowel Shift Research Articles

Compression in the California Vowel Shift: Tracking generational sound change in California's Central Valley

ABSTRACTThis paper investigates the California Vowel Shift, previously characterized as a chain shift, in communities across California's Central Valley. An incremental apparent time analysis of 72 Californians’ vowel spaces provides no clear evidence of a gradual chain shift; that is, changes have not unfolded in an order that reflects an implicational chain in chronological time. Instead, we see contemporaneous movements of vowels that work against the phonological tendency of maximal dispersion typically invoked in describing chain shifts. By analyzing change in the size and dispersion of the entire vowel space, we find that ongoing sound change is instead characterized by a holistic compression of the vowel space. This suggests that, in these California communities, the shift's unfolding was driven by articulatory and social, rather than purely phonological, factors. We propose that the analysis of the size and spread of holistic vowel space can help characterize the nature and motivations for vocalic changes.

중세한국어 모음조화의 양상에 대하여

This study investigates aspects of vowel harmony in Late Middle Korean from the 15th century to the 16th century. Since the 10th century, restructuring of the vowel system resulting from vowel shift brought about the diachronic declination of palatal vowel harmony between front and back vowels. Since the 15th century, vowel harmony in Korean has been in a steady decline. To examine the frequencies of vowel harmony from the 15th to the 16th century, I analyze a historical Korean corpus from the perspective of Information Theory, measuring the quantitative analysis index of vowel harmony by means of the information-theoretic notions of positive logarithm and mutual information. Mutual information (MI) between the vowels in autosegmental tiers leads to three findings regarding vowel harmony in Late Middle Korean. First, the preference for harmonic positive vowels in the Korean vowel system is more effective than the preference for harmonic negative vowels. Second, if the preceding vowel is a diphthong beginning with a /w/ glide, there is little effect of vowel harmony in Middle Korean. Finally, the vowel harmony between monophthongs is more regular than that between diphthongs or triphthongs.

A Closer Look at the Short Front Vowel Shift in Canada

This paper examines several aspects of the “Short Front Vowel Shift” (SFVS) in Canadian English, known in most previous research as the “Canadian Vowel Shift.” It is based on acoustic analysis of a list of one hundred words produced by sixty-one Canadian and thirty-one American university students. The analysis focuses on three questions: (1) the relations among the vowels involved in the shift, including relations with vowels not traditionally considered part of the shift; (2) the behavior of individual words in each vowel category, which displays allophonic variation; and (3) the role of regional and national identity (western versus eastern Canadian, and Canadian versus American) and speaker sex in predicting the degree of participation in the shift, which is measured with a unitary quantitative index of the shift that is proposed here for the first time. The analysis finds that the short front vowels (kit, dress, and trap) lower and retract as a set, but that shifts of several back vowels (particularly foot, goat, and strut) are also correlated but not necessarily structurally connected with these; that following voiceless fricatives favor the SFVS while preceding velars disfavor it; that women are more advanced in the shift than men; that there is no regional difference within Canada in the progress of the shift; and, most surprisingly, that, once the American comparison group is restricted to those with a low-back merger, Americans are more shifted than their Canadian peers, calling into question the association of the shift with Canada in most previous research on Canadian English.

The southern shift and regional identity in Appalachia

The Southern Vowel Shift (SVS) historically occurred across the Southern U.S. (e.g., Labov et al., 1972; Feagin, 1986). Several recent studies document the retreat of the SVS in the urban (Fridland, 1999; Prichard, 2010; Dodsworth and Kohn, 2012). However, Irons (2007) found the SVS advancing in rural Kentucky. Thus, Fridland notes the SVS might not be supra-regional norm, serving rather as ecological distinction within the South (2012:187). As an ecological distinction, SVS features might reflect a speaker’s orientation toward differing ecologies. Thus, a speaker with a rural orientation might use more SVS features than a speaker who is less rurally oriented. The present paper investigates the SVS in rural speech examining three features: monophthongization of /aI/, rotation of /E/ and /e/, and rotation of /I/ and /i/. Data come from sociolinguistic interviews, reading passages, and words lists from 25 speakers from rural northeast Tennessee. Additionally, every participant completed a Rootedness Metric, a psychometric survey that quantifies place-based orientation. Results indicate that speakers exhibit SVS features, with reversals of the relative front vowel positions and monophthongization of /aI/ in all positions (cf. Irons, 2007). However, more rooted speakers exhibited the most advanced SVS features. Thus, the central difference of SVS features may not merely be ecological, rather the speaker’s relationship to the differing regional ecologies.The Southern Vowel Shift (SVS) historically occurred across the Southern U.S. (e.g., Labov et al., 1972; Feagin, 1986). Several recent studies document the retreat of the SVS in the urban (Fridland, 1999; Prichard, 2010; Dodsworth and Kohn, 2012). However, Irons (2007) found the SVS advancing in rural Kentucky. Thus, Fridland notes the SVS might not be supra-regional norm, serving rather as ecological distinction within the South (2012:187). As an ecological distinction, SVS features might reflect a speaker’s orientation toward differing ecologies. Thus, a speaker with a rural orientation might use more SVS features than a speaker who is less rurally oriented. The present paper investigates the SVS in rural speech examining three features: monophthongization of /aI/, rotation of /E/ and /e/, and rotation of /I/ and /i/. Data come from sociolinguistic interviews, reading passages, and words lists from 25 speakers from rural northeast Tennessee. Additionally, every participant completed a Roo...

Do social preferences matter in lexical retuning?

In perceiving spoken language, listeners not only recognize and comprehend the intended meaning of the speaker’s words and phrases; they also assess the social dimensions of the speaker. In the present study, we ask whether perceptual learning — a process by which listeners adapt to novel pronunciations — is modulated by listeners’ social preferences. To this end, we use a novel accent exhibiting a back vowel lowering chain shift in pleasant and unpleasant conditions in a lexically guided perceptual learning paradigm to test whether listeners adapt less to the unpleasant guise. Experiment 1 confirms that listeners disprefer the unpleasant guise. Using a lexical decision task as a measure of lexical adaptation, Experiment 2 indicates that listeners in the pleasant and unpleasant guises learned the back vowel shift compared to listeners in a control group. These results suggest that exposure to a voice with lower social prestige does not inhibit lexical adaptation.

Impact of Great Vowel Shift on Arab Learners Use of English Spelling

This study aims to investigate the impact of great vowel shift in the writing process of the Arab students for whom English is a foreign language. It attempts to find out how to motivate students to overcome obstacles faced by them. It discusses a few spelling issues suggesting how the knowing of a language is different from knowing its style of writing. Based on documentation survey, researcher concluded that studies in the Arab world have though examined the mistakes committed by Arab students when they write, but merely a few studies have talked about motivating Arab students to learn the language rather than look for errors that learners commit. While investigating the impact of great vowel shift on Arab learners’ use of English spelling, this study concludes that the essence of communication is in acquiring the semantics of a language and not knowing its form. This study recommends adopting latest teaching methods to activate self-trust and inner motivation between the teacher and the students and simultaneously enliven an outer motivation too.

Visual Speech Perception Cues Constrain Patterns of Articulatory Variation and Sound Change.

What are the factors that contribute to (or inhibit) diachronic sound change? While acoustically motivated sound changes are well-documented, research on the articulatory and audiovisual-perceptual aspects of sound change is limited. This paper investigates the interaction of articulatory variation and audiovisual speech perception in the Northern Cities Vowel Shift (NCVS), a pattern of sound change observed in the Great Lakes region of the United States. We focus specifically on the maintenance of the contrast between the vowels /ɑ/ and /ɔ/, both of which are fronted as a result of the NCVS. We present results from two experiments designed to test how the NCVS is produced and perceived. In the first experiment, we present data from an articulatory and acoustic analysis of the production of fronted /ɑ/ and /ɔ/. We find that some speakers distinguish /ɔ/ from /ɑ/ with a combination of both tongue position and lip rounding, while others do so using either tongue position or lip rounding alone. For speakers who distinguish /ɔ/ from /ɑ/ along only one articulatory dimension, /ɑ/ and /ɔ/ are acoustically more similar than for speakers who produce multiple articulatory distinctions. While all three groups of speakers maintain some degree of acoustic contrast between the vowels, the question is raised as to whether these articulatory strategies differ in their perceptibility. In the perception experiment, we test the hypothesis that visual speech cues play a role in maintaining contrast between the two sounds. The results of this experiment suggest that articulatory configurations in which /ɔ/ is produced with unround lips are perceptually weaker than those in which /ɔ/ is produced with rounding, even though these configurations result in acoustically similar output. We argue that these findings have implications for theories of sound change and variation in at least two respects: (1) visual cues can shape phonological systems through misperception-based sound change, and (2) phonological systems may be optimized not only for auditory but also for visual perceptibility.

Vowel Dynamics in the Southern Vowel Shift

Vowel Dynamics in the Southern Vowel Shift

And then I saw her race: Race-based expectations affect infants’ word processing

How do our expectations about speakers shape speech perception? Adults’ speech perception is influenced by social properties of the speaker (e.g., race). When in development do these influences begin? In the current study, 16-month-olds heard familiar words produced in their native accent (e.g., “dog”) and in an unfamiliar accent involving a vowel shift (e.g., “dag”), in the context of an image of either a same-race speaker or an other-race speaker. Infants’ interpretation of the words depended on the speaker’s race. For the same-race speaker, infants only recognized words produced in the familiar accent; for the other-race speaker, infants recognized both versions of the words. Two additional experiments showed that infants only recognized an other-race speaker’s atypical pronunciations when they differed systematically from the native accent. These results provide the first evidence that expectations driven by unspoken properties of speakers, such as race, influence infants’ speech processing.

Modeling geographic variation in pronunciation of United Kingdom English

This paper details an investigation of geographic variation of UK English pronunciation based on formant trajectories of the diphthongs /aɪ/ and /aʊ/. Thousands of audio samples of these vowels were retrieved from the spoken portion of the British National Corpus (BNC), and their F1 and F2 values were compared across 89 locations within the UK. The study was designed with an expectation of a spectrum of pronunciations existing across the UK with monophthongal realizations primarily found in the Northern and Western areas of the country and more diphthongization occurring in the South. After searching the BNC for phonemically aligned tokens of “five” and “house,” functional data, modal, and geographic analyses were conducted. We found a strong correlation between speaker distance from the dataset’s northernmost location and diphthongization of /aɪ/. This finding suggests that the variation in pronunciation of the vowel in “five” is more continuous than isoglossic. By investigating formant trajectories of vowels involved in the English Great Vowel Shift, we have captured variation in pronunciation that exists across the UK as a result of English sound change.

The Construction of Social Meaning: A Matched-Guise Investigation of the California Vowel Shift

Past production research on the California Vowel Shift (CVS) has suggested that the CVS carries social meanings of carefreeness, Whiteness, femininity, and privilege (e.g., Eckert 2008b), but it is...

Mechanisms of Vowel Variation in African American English.

This research explored mechanisms of vowel variation in African American English by comparing 2 geographically distant groups of African American and White American English speakers for participation in the African American Shift and the Southern Vowel Shift. Thirty-two male (African American: n = 16, White American controls: n = 16) lifelong residents of cities in eastern and western North Carolina produced heed,hid,heyd,head,had,hod,hawed,whod,hood,hoed,hide,howed,hoyd, and heard 3 times each in random order. Formant frequency, duration, and acoustic analyses were completed for the vowels /i, ɪ, e, ɛ, æ, ɑ, ɔ, u, ʊ, o, aɪ, aʊ, oɪ, ɝ/ produced in the listed words. African American English speakers show vowel variation. In the west, the African American English speakers are participating in the Southern Vowel Shift and hod fronting of the African American Shift. In the east, neither the African American English speakers nor their White peers are participating in the Southern Vowel Shift. The African American English speakers show limited participation in the African American Shift. The results provide evidence of regional and socio-ethnic variation in African American English in North Carolina.

A preliminary examination of the gender role in back-vowel fronting in Central Louisiana

In addition to the Southern Vowel Shift that involves /ɛ ɪ/ fronting, high back vowels also tend to be fronted in white Southern U.S. speech (Labov, Ash, & Boberg, 2006; Thomas, 2001). The tense /u/ is the first to shift in the back-vowel system, followed by the lax /ʊ/. Gender effect on the degree of fronting has been reported for one vowel but not the other: Male speakers lead in /u/fronting, whereas /ʊ/ fronting occurs more or less uniformly across speakers of different genders (Clopper, Pisoni, & de Jong; Fridland, 2001). This study provides a preliminary examination of the role of gender in the relative degree of back vowel fronting in young adult speakers from Central Louisiana. They were recorded producing words with target vowels in a variety of tasks: word list and passage reading, sentence creation, and informal conversation. The formant values were analyzed with a reference to other vowels in each speaker and with a reference to average values for Southern U.S. English reported in previous rese...

Acoustically quantifying /ai/ monophthongization in four southern dialect regions

The Atlas of North American English describes four southern U.S. dialect areas: Inland South (IS; interior Appalachia), Texas South (TS; around Dallas), Florida (FL), and South (S; remainder of Southern US). These areas are distinguished by degree of /ai/ monophthongization, the Southern Vowel Shift’s (SVS) triggering feature (Labov et al., 2006). IS is argued to be most advanced in the SVS, and /ai/ weakens in all phonetic environments. While not as advanced generally, TS also features all-environment weakening. In S, /ai/ weakens only in syllable-final and pre-voiced conditions, and in FL it remains diphthongal. This study uses the Digital Archive of Southern Speech (DASS) to acoustically measure /ai/ weakening in each region. Speech was force-aligned and F1 and F2 values collected at five time points. Related work on F2 formant angle in DASS speech has suggested /ai/ weakens most in IS (Renwick and Stanley, 2017). Here, trajectory length (TL) measurement (Fox and Jacewicz, 2009) corroborates evidence f...

Acoustic correlates of perceived southernness ratings

The Southern U.S. dialect and the Southern Vowel Shift (SVS), in particular, have been the subject of extensive research (e.g., Feagin, 1986; Labov, 1991; Fridland & Kendall, 2015), though there is limited work examining what acoustic cues trigger listeners to judge a speaker as sounding southern (cf. Fridland, Bartlett, & Kreuz, 2004; Allbritten, 2011). Fridland & Kendall (2012), and others, have used the Euclidean distance (ED) between the front vowels /e/ and /ɛ/ as a gradient metric of speakers’ degree of SVS shiftedness. While this was demonstrated to be a useful diagnostic in production, it has not been tested against listeners’ percepts of speakers’ southerness. This study asks: are listeners’ perceptions of southernness predicted by a speaker’s /e/-/ɛ/ ED, or other such measures? To test this question, we presented listeners with isolated words from both southern and western speakers. Listeners rated words on a 1–9 scale of how southern they sound. We assess whether southernness ratings are predic...

Dynamic trajectories of tense vs. lax vowels in the American South

Regional variation in American English speech is often described in terms of vowel shifts, in which one or more sounds “move” within the X,Y plane of height and backness captured by vowels’ first and second formant values. Such shifts indicate which sounds are converging or diverging, providing predictions for language change and variation. Static characterizations of shifting, with a single pair of F1/F2 values taken near the vowels’ midpoint or intensity peak, provide an approximation of vowels’ relations, but fail to capture acoustic information during the rest of the vowels’ time course. In Southern dialects, where front tense and lax vowels may “swap places,” static measures show strong overlap between these pairs and thus predict mergers between, e.g., beet-bit, bait-bet; instead, these mergers’ clear lack of occurrence indicates the inadequacy of static methods. Using data from 64 semi-spontaneous linguistic interviews in the Digital Archive of Southern Speech, we model the shape and movement of vowels’ dynamic trajectories. Formant values taken at five locations show that tense and lax vowels have distinct beginning and endpoints, though they pass through shared acoustic space near their temporal midpoints. Sociolinguistic factors affecting trajectories’ length and shape are investigated using Generalized Additive Mixed Models.

前舌母音推移と NEAR/SQUARE 融合はニュージーランド英語に特有か

前舌母音推移と NEAR/SQUARE 融合はニュージーランド英語に特有か

東日本方言における中舌母音の起源に関する一つの仮説 : 琉球方言の音変化に照らして( 東日本の音声)

東日本方言における中舌母音の起源に関する一つの仮説 : 琉球方言の音変化に照らして( 東日本の音声)

Analyzing dialect variation in historical speech corpora.

The Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States is an extensive audio corpus of sociolinguistic interviews with 1121 speakers from eight southeastern U.S. states. Complete interviews have never been fully transcribed, leaving a wealth of phonetic information unexplored. This paper details methods for large-scale acoustic analysis of this historical speech corpus, providing a fuller picture of Southern speech than offered by previous impressionistic analyses. Interviews from 10 speakers (∼36 h) in southeast Georgia were transcribed and analyzed for dialectal features associated with the Southern Vowel Shift and African American Vowel Shift, also considering the effects of age, gender, and race. Multiple tokens of common words were annotated (N = 6085), and formant values of their stressed vowels were extracted. The effects of shifting on relative vowel placement were evaluated via Pillai scores, and vowel dynamics were estimated via functional data analysis and modeled with linear mixed-effects regression. Results indicate that European American speakers show features of the Southern Vowel Shift, though certain speakers shift in more ways than others, and African American speakers' productions are consistent with the African American Vowel Shift. Wide variation is apparent, even within this small geographic region, contributing evidence of the complexity of Southern speech.

Aye–ay: An Anglo-Frisian Parallel

The most widespread form for neutral “yes” in the Survey of English Dialects is not yea or yes, but aye. It is used not only in the North and Midlands, but also in areas of the South of England. It is a feature of Scottish English, and is familiar from government in many English-speaking countries. We also find the aye-like ayuh in Northeast America. “Aye” appears suddenly about 1575 and is “exceedingly common” around 1600; it is initially written I and its origin, like yes, is uncertain. Ay is also found in Old Frisian, as well as Sater Frisian today (öäi, a'äi etc.). This study reviews a number of proposed etymologies, examining which can account for the occurrence or development of ay(e) in both languages. Based on a wider study of change in forms of “yes” and “no” in English, the author argues that aye–ay is a parallel development of interjection + particle. The study also suggests functional and phonological overlap with the pronominal echo I in English, but not Frisian, with the vocalic form of the pronoun and diphthongisation in the “Great Vowel Shift”, accounting for the popularity and spelling I of “aye” around 1600.