Annette D'Onofrio

Country ideology and the California Vowel Shift

Addressing the dearth of variation research in nonurban, noncoastal regions of California, this study examines the extent to which speakers in Redding, an inland community just north of the Central Valley, participate in the California Vowel Shift (CVS). We acoustically analyze the fronting of the back vowels boot and boat , the raising of ban and backing of bat , and the merger of bot and bought, in sociolinguistic interviews with 30 white lifelong residents. Results reveal a change in apparent time for all analyzed variables, indicating the CVSs progression through the community, though not as robust as in urban, coastal areas. Additionally, we provide evidence that shifting patterns for different vowels are structured by the ideological divide between town and country. Thus, as the CVS spreads through Redding, speakers utilize particular features of the shift differently, negotiating identities relevant in Californias nonurban locales.

Jaw setting and the California Vowel Shift in parodic performance

This article explores the intertwining semiotics of language and embodiment in performances of Californian personae. We analyze two actors’ performances of Californian characters in parodic skits, comparing them to the same actors’ performances of non-Californian characters. In portraying their Californian characters, the actors use particularized jaw settings, which we link to embodied stereotypes from earlier portrayals of the Valley Girl and Surfer Dude personae. Acoustic analysis demonstrates that both actors also produce features of the California Vowel Shift in their Californian performances, aligning their linguistic productions with sound changes documented in California. We argue that these embodied stereotypes and phonetic realizations not only co-occur in parodic styles, but are in fact semiotically and corporeally intertwined, one occasioning the other. Moreover, the performances participate in the broader process of enregisterment , packaging these semiotic resources with other linguistic and extralinguistic features to recontextualize Californian personae in the present day. (Parody, performance, California, California Vowel Shift, embodiment, embodied stereotype, enregisterment) *

Refining bouba-kiki: Phonetic detail and object dimensionality in sound-shape correspondences

Speakers cross-linguistically associate non-words that have round vowels, such as /buba/, with round shapes, and non-words without round vowels, such as /kike/, with spiky shapes (e.g. Kohler 1947). While this link has been attributed to cognitive associations between rounded vowel sounds and images of rounded lips, stimuli have conflated vowel roundness with other phonetic features that may also contribute to the correspondence. In this study, 200 listeners matched abstract objects with nonsense words that systematically varied by vowel frontness, consonant place of articulation, and consonant voicing. Listeners are significantly more likely to select a spiky shape over a round shape when given words with voiceless consonants, alveolar consonants, and front vowels; combinations of these features strengthen the effect. These findings are corroborated in the realm of real-world objects. 102 participants were more likely to name a rounded member of a real-world object class when hearing a word containing no...

Differences in the recognition of careful and casual speech

Previous work in spoken word recognition and speech perception has shown two seemingly conflicting patterns. While some studies have shown a processing benefit for more frequent word variants (i.e., in a casual speech mode), others have found a benefit for more canonical word forms (i.e., in a careful speech mode). This study aims to reconcile these findings, proposing that different types of processing apply to each speech mode–top-down processing for casual speech, and bottom-up for careful speech. Listeners in an auditory priming task heard natural (non-spliced) sentences spoken in either a careful or casual speech mode. The final word of the auditory prime was either semantically predictable from the preceding sentence context or unpredictable. After the audio prime, listeners responded in a lexical decision task to a visual probe: either the final word heard in the prime, an unrelated word, or a nonword. Preliminary results suggest that, regardless of speech style, reaction times are faster for related targets in the semantically predictable conditions than for unrelated targets. Crucially, responses to the target word in the careful condition are delayed compared to casual speech for semantically unpredictable sentences. The implications for the apparent paradox in previous results will be discussed.

Linguistic and social effects on perceptions of voice onset time in Korean stops

This paper investigates effects of linguistic and social factors on phoneme categorization of Seoul Korean stops. In an investigation of VOT in aspirated versus lenis stops of Korean, Oh (2011) reports VOT length in aspirated stops to be conditioned both linguistically and socially: bilabial stops exhibit shorter VOT than velars, following /a/ conditions shorter VOT than /i/, and female speakers exhibit shorter VOT than males. 10 native speakers of Seoul Korean (5 men, 5 women) were recorded producing bilabial and velar stops in the frame /CVn/. Recordings were manipulated to create a 10-step continuum of VOT length for each speaker, from 25ms to 115ms. 30 native speakers of Seoul Korean listened to each of these manipulated stimuli for every speaker and categorized them as containing either aspirated or lenis stops. Listeners were more likely to categorize a given VOT as aspirated when it occurred in a bilabial stop as opposed to a velar stop, when it preceded /a/ as opposed to /i/, and when it was produ...