Alicia Beckford Wassink

A geometric representation of spectral and temporal vowel features: quantification of vowel overlap in three linguistic varieties.

A geometrical method for computing overlap between vowel distributions, the spectral overlap assessment metric (SOAM), is applied to an investigation of spectral (F1, F2) and temporal (duration) relations in three different types of systems: one claimed to exhibit primary quality (American English), one primary quantity (Jamaican Creole), and one about which no claims have been made (Jamaican English). Shapes, orientations, and proximities of pairs of vowel distributions involved in phonological oppositions are modeled using best-fit ellipses (in F1 x F2 space) and ellipsoids (F1 x F2 x duration). Overlap fractions computed for each pair suggest that spectral and temporal features interact differently in the three varieties and oppositions. Under a two-dimensional analysis, two of three American English oppositions show no overlap; the third shows partial overlap. All Jamaican Creole oppositions exhibit complete overlap when F1 and F2 alone are modeled, but no or partial overlap with incorporation of a factor for duration. Jamaican English three-dimensional overlap fractions resemble two-dimensional results for American English. A multidimensional analysis tool such as SOAM appears to provide a more objective basis for simultaneously investigating spectral and temporal relations within vowel systems. Normalization methods and the SOAM method are described in an extended appendix.

Intraspeaker variability in vowel production: An investigation of motherese, hyperspeech, and Lombard speech in Jamaican speakers

Abstract Examination of five acoustic parameters (F0, F1, F2, segmental duration, and intensity) allowed comparison of Infant-Directed Speech (IDS), Hyperspeech, and the Lombard reflex. These phenomena have typically been investigated separately, each characterized in terms of one or two acoustic features (e.g., intensity for Lombard speech). The present two-part experiment examined intraspeaker and interspeaker variability in speakers of Jamaican Creole and Jamaican English. IDS and Lombard speech showed similar adjustments in two parameters (F0 and intensity), and IDS and Citation speech showed the greatest spectral differences. This result is important because it shows that while one or two acoustic parameters may be crucial characteristics of a type of exaggerated speech, task production involved the systematic adjustment of a complex set of continuous acoustic parameters. Taken together, the acoustic outcomes for the types of perturbations investigated here allow the tasks to be arranged along a continuum. These adjustments resemble patterns associated with the manipulation of sociolinguistic markers reported in sociophonetic studies of “style-shifting.” We argue that the two phenomena may be treated under a unified account of intraspeaker variability that builds upon the sociolinguistic concept of Audience Design.

Production of high vowels in Canadian English and Canadian French: A comparison of early bilingual and monolingual speakers

Abstract The goal of this study is to investigate how monolingual and early bilingual speakers of Canadian English and Canadian French produce high vowels. The vowels of the bilingual participants were assessed in their two languages, thus permitting the exploration of interactions between the two languages. Findings indicated that the bilinguals formed separate categories across the two languages for similar vowels, and produced monolingual-like values for these vowels. When speaking English, they produced lax vowels that were low and less dispersed (for F2); these vowels were similar to the vowels of the English-speaking monolinguals. When speaking French the bilinguals produced lax vowels that were somewhat higher and more peripheral, like the French monolinguals. The results of the present study differ from investigations of late bilinguals, whose vowel productions exhibited influences of the phonemic categories of their first language. This work contributes to a small but growing body of research of the acoustic-phonetic differences between Canadian English and Canadian French and to the understanding of acoustic-phonetic abilities of early bilingual speakers.

Language Ideology and the Transmission of Phonological Change Changing Indexicality in Two Situations of Language Contact

The authors consider the changing indexicality of phonological variants in two different contact situations—Corby, United Kingdom, and Kingston, Jamaica. While quite different sites of contact, they suggest that similar sociolinguistic phenomena may be observed in both places. Using a language ideology framework, acoustic and auditory phonetic data are interpreted through respondents’own metalinguistic comments about their dialect. This socially embedded interpretation of the data reveals that in both Corby and Kingston, one phonological variant may in fact index distinct and different identities for speakers in the respective communities. In particular, in both Corby and Kingston, features associated with historically stigmatized varieties have apparently been adopted by the younger generations as a means of marking local identity and pride. This method of interpretation offers an alternative method of analyzing variationist data and follows earlier work conducted in language ideology.

Addressing Ideologies around African American English

In 1998, in the wake of the Oakland Unified School District Board Resolution on Ebonics, the Journal of English Linguistics published a special issue focused specifically on the Ebonics controversy. The contributors attempted to make sense of what had happened in the public debate around Ebonics, to clarify public misunderstandings, and to rearticulate the educational goals that underlay the Oakland Resolution. Now, seven years later, in the year when America is observing the fiftieth anniversary of Brown vs. Board, the 1954 Supreme Court decision that removed legal segregation in education, this special issue attempts to take stock of where studies of African American English stand and to envision some of the next steps. One of the many things that we learned after the Oakland Resolution was how vast the gap is between public knowledge about African American English (AAE) and linguistic research about the variety. It may be more appropriate, however, to say that we “relearned” this. As Geneva Smitherman pointed out in the 1998 special issue and elaborates in this issue, the public response in 1979 to what is often called the Ann Arbor Black English Case revealed many of the same public misunderstandings as those apparent in the late 1990s about the legitimacy of AAE as a dialect and about educational goals that involve fostering bidialectalism. We are currently at a moment when the public is not talking about AAE—questions about the variety’s legitimacy and its role in the educational system have, for the moment, disappeared from the public eye. At the same time, linguistic scholarship on this language variety continues to develop, public policy that affects the sta-

Pacific northwest vowels: A Seattle neighborhood dialect study

According to current literature a large region encompassing nearly the entire west half of the U.S. belongs to one dialect region referred to as Western, which furthermore, according to Labov et al., ‘‘... has developed a characteristic but not unique phonology.’’ [http://www.ling.upenn.edu/phono—atlas/NationalMap/NationalMap.html] This paper will describe the vowel space of a set of Pacific Northwest American English speakers native to the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle, Wash. based on the acoustical analysis of high‐quality Marantz CDR 300 recordings. Characteristics, such as low back merger and [u] fronting will be compared to findings by other studies. It is hoped that these recordings will contribute to a growing number of corpora of North American English dialects. All participants were born in Seattle and began their residence in Ballard between ages 0–8. They were recorded in two styles of speech: individually reading repetitions of a word list containing one token each of 10 vowels within carrier phrases, and in casual conversation for 40 min with a partner matched in age, gender, and social mobility. The goal was to create a compatible data set for comparison with current acoustic studies. F1 and F2 and vowel duration from LPC spectral analysis will be presented.

AFRICAN AMERICAN ENGLISH IN URBAN SEATTLE: ACCOMMODATION AND INTRASPEAKER VARIATION IN THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST

This study considers intraspeaker (style-related) variation and its links to both identity and authenticity in African American English (AAE) speech. It presents a case study of intraspeaker variation in one African American woman from Seattle, Washington, who maintains deep network connections with both African American and white speakers. We examine her variation in two showcase variables (ay-monophthongization; merger of pin-pen), drawing from data collected in conver- sations with speakers of different ethnicities, to examine the envelope of variation exhibited by this speaker. While her use of core AAE features is not categorical or high-frequency, she does display quantitative shifts in core AAE features that signal responses to interlocutor familiarity, interlocutor speech, and interlocutor ethnicity. The study supports the conclusion that higher-status African Americans can signal an authentic identity with low-frequency but stylized use of AAE forms and argues for a broader concept of AAE competence that takes into account the range of stylistic variation a speaker displays.

Acoustic quantification of /i/-/I/ overlap in children 21 to 33 months.

This longitudinal investigation examined the temporal and spectral characteristics of the high front vowels /i/ and /I/ as produced by nine monolingual US English children from 21–33 months. Vowel overlap was quantified in two-dimensional (F1, F2) and three-dimensional (F1, F2, duration) space using Spectral Overlap Assessment Measure (SOAM). These findings were compared with the results from Support Vector Machine (SVM) vowel classification, vowel duration ratios, and measures of effect size, to determine whether a spectral/temporal trading effect existed in the early vowel productions of young children. Children between the ages of 21 and 33 months are highly variable in the way they use spectral and temporal parameters to distinguish between these two adjacent vowels. However, findings pointed to the existence of a spectral/temporal trading effect when spectral overlap values are relatively high (>60%) at 21 and 24 months of age.

Vowel reduction and merger in Pacific Northwest English.

The assumption stands in acoustic phonetics that vowel reduction (including undershoot and centralization of short vowels) is greater in casual than controlled speech. However, few studies have investigated the relative magnitude of language‐general (phonetic) effects relative to dialect‐specific (sociolinguistic) ones. This paper investigates reduction in vowels undergoing sound‐change. Pacific Northwestern English (PNWE) /ae/, /e/ are rising to the spectral location of /ey/, a “merger by approximation” [W. Labov, Princ. Ling. Change, Blackwell (1994)]. Sociolinguistic literature guided selection of two stable/changing pairs (in which one member is stable, the other involved in the merger): /iy ey/, /ɪe/. The normalized corpus (n=1500) was balanced for the following place and voicing and included three conditions (wordlist, reading, and casual). Speakers were partitioned into groups (merged/unmerged). Wassink’s [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 119, 2334–2350 (2006)] spectral overlap assessment metric was used to dete...

Child directed speech, speech in noise and hyperarticulated speech in the Pacific Northwest

Three types of exaggerated speech are thought to be systematic responses to accommodate the needs of the listener: child‐directed speech (CDS), hyperspeech, and the Lombard response. CDS (e.g., Kuhl et al., 1997) occurs in interactions with young children and infants. Hyperspeech (Johnson et al., 1993) is a modification in response to listeners difficulties in recovering the intended message. The Lombard response (e.g., Lane et al., 1970) is a compensation for increased noise in the signal. While all three result from adaptations to accommodate the needs of the listener, and therefore should share some features, the triggering conditions are quite different, and therefore should exhibit differences in their phonetic outcomes. While CDS has been the subject of a variety of acoustic studies, it has never been studied in the broader context of the other ‘‘exaggerated’’ speech styles. A large crosslinguistic study was undertaken that compares speech produced under four conditions: spontaneous conversations, C...