Erik R. Thomas

Phonological and Phonetic Characteristics of African American Vernacular English

The numerous controversies surrounding African American Vernacular English can be illuminated by data from phonological and phonetic variables. However, what is known about different variables varies greatly, with consonantal variables receiving the most scholarly attention, followed by vowel quality, prosody, and finally voice quality. Variables within each domain are discussed here and what has been learned about their realizations in African American speech is compiled. The degree of variation of each variable within African American speech is also summarized when it is known. Areas for which more work is needed are noted.

SOCIOPHONETIC APPLICATIONS OF SPEECH PERCEPTION EXPERIMENTS

�Although studies of perception are still largely assigned to the realms of experimental phonetics or psychology, sociolinguists have been recognizing the importance of perception. Several lines of experimental inquiry have emerged. Nevertheless, perception has been studied far less by sociolinguists than has speech production. One reason is that speech perception is daunting at first. Examining it requires careful attention to experimental design, a considerable amount of preparation, and, in many cases, use of a speech synthesizer. Even so, research on perception can be highly productive. This paper attempts to review the sorts of experiments that have been conducted in the past and to provide guidelines for sociolinguists interested in studying perception, with suggestions for future work. Although perception has been a neglected stepsister of production in sociolinguistics, it, like Cinderella, may have its day soon. Two important factors could—and should—move perception to the forefront of sociophonetic research. One is simply the huge potential for sociolinguistic perception studies because the area has been neglected for so long. The other reason is a more practical one: although perception experiments require extreme attention to detail in the preparation phase, data analysis is generally less time-consuming than in production studies, and this difference may make it more attractive to researchers. The aversion of much of sociolinguistics to perception has been, to some extent, more apparent than real. Many sociolinguistic studies over the past generation, especially instrumental studies, have succeeded in divorcing speech production from speech perception. However, perception issues may play a hidden role in studies that ostensibly address production. The reason is that variationists have not always carefully distinguished production from perception. This tendency is an artifact of the reliance of sociolinguistics on impressionistic transcription. The impressionistic tradition, based on the development of the International Phonetic Alphabet and of the Cardinal Vowel system of Daniel Jones, dominated dialect

A rural/metropolitan split in the speech of Texas Anglos

The migration of people to the Sunbelt in the United States constitutes a major demographic shift, but has received little attention from language variationists. In Texas, this migration has led to a split of the Anglo population of the state into two dialects, a rural dialect and a metropolitan dialect. Evidence from a random-sample survey of Texas and from a systematic set of surveys of high schools in the state shows that young rural Anglos preserve two stereotypical features of the Texas accent, monophthongal /ai/, as in night, and lowered onsets of/e/, as in day, while young Anglos from metropolitan centers lack these features. This difference, which is absent among middle-aged and older native Texan Anglos, appears to have resulted from the fact that in-migration from other parts of the country is concentrated in metropolitan centers, especially suburbs.

Spectral differences in /ai/ offsets conditioned by voicing of the following consonant

Abstract Two experiments were designed to investigate the observation that offsets of pre-/t/ /ai/ (e.g., tight) show lower F1and higher F2than those of pre-/d/ /ai/ (e.g. tide) in some dialects. The first experiment examined production of /ai/ in minimal pairs like tide... tight by non-Hispanic whites from two central Ohio communities and Mexican Americans from southern Texas. Results confirmed that the spectral difference occurs in the speech of the central Ohioans. Although it was anticipated that the south Texas subjects would not exhibit the spectral difference, they did produce it, but to a lesser degree than the central Ohioans. The second experiment examined perception of stimuli as tight, tide, or tie by non-Hispanic whites from central Ohio and Mexican Americans from southern Texas to investigate whether the observed patterns in production are reflected in perception. It was confirmed that speakers of the two dialects under study can access the offset spectral difference as a perceptual cue. Moreover, it was found that speakers of the two dialects differ in perception of the spectral difference. The cross-dialectal discrepancies show that the spectral difference is part of a speakers grammar, even though it is not contrastive.

Secrets Revealed by Southern Vowel Shifting

�� Discussions of the vowel variants of Southern English have been extensive and have continued without interruption for over a hundred years. McMillan and Montgomery (1989) list several hundred works on the phonology of Southern English, a large portion of which cover vocalic variation. Dozens of works have appeared since McMillan and Montgomery’s bibliography was published. No other region of the United States has attracted this level of interest in its vowels, either from scholars or in the popular press. With such sustained attention, one would expect that research on this variety had reached a point of diminishing returns. In fact, however, it has not. Southern English remains a trove of yet undiscovered dialectal configurations, for vowels as well as for other variables. A clearer understanding of these variants can aid in sociolinguistic descriptions, but in some cases it can also provide insights into the processes of sound change, phonological structure, and even speech perception. The several variables examined here demonstrate how Southern vowels can illuminate each of these latter domains.

The regional context of earlier African American speech: Evidence for reconstructing the development of AAVE

Despite extensive research over the past four decades, a number of issues concerning the historical and current development of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) remain unresolved. This study utilizes a unique sociolinguistic situation - a long-standing, isolated, biracial community situated in a distinctive dialect region of coastal North Carolina - to address questions of localized dialect accommodation and ethnolinguistic distinctiveness in earlier African American English. A comparison of diagnostic phonological and morphosyntactic variables for a sample of four different generations of African Americans and a baseline European American group shows that considerable accommodation of the localized dialect occurred in earlier African American speech. Nonetheless, certain dialect features e.g., copula absence and 3rd person verbal s marking - were distinctively maintained by African Americans in the face of localized dialect accommodation; and this suggests long-term ethnolinguistic distinctiveness. Crossgenerational change among African Americans indicates that younger speakers are moving away from the localized Pamlico Sound dialect toward a more generalized AAVE norm. Contact-based and identity-based explanations are offered for the current trend of localized dialect displacement. (African American Vernacular English, dialect, language change, identity, language contact)*

Cues used for distinguishing African American and European American voices

Past studies have shown that listeners can distinguish most African American and European American voices, but how they do so is poorly understood. Three experiments were designed to investigate this problem. Recordings of African American and European American college students performing various reading tasks were used as the basis for stimuli in all three. In the first experiment, stimuli were subjected to monotonization, lowpass filtering at 660 Hz, and no modification. In the second, stimuli featuring certain ethnically diagnostic vowels and control stimuli were subjected to monotonization, conversion of vowels to schwa, or no modification. In the third, stimuli featuring diagnostic vowels and control stimuli were modified so that the intonation of paired African American and European American speakers was swapped. In all three experiments, African American and European American listeners in North Carolina and European American listeners in West Virginia identified the ethnicity of the speaker of each...

The articulatory dynamics of pre-velar and pre-nasal /æ/-raising in English: An ultrasound studya)

Most dialects of North American English exhibit /æ/-raising in some phonological contexts. Both the conditioning environments and the temporal dynamics of the raising vary from region to region. To explore the articulatory basis of /æ/-raising across North American English dialects, acoustic and articulatory data were collected from a regionally diverse group of 24 English speakers from the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. A method for examining the temporal dynamics of speech directly from ultrasound video using EigenTongues decomposition [Hueber, Aversano, Chollet, Denby, Dreyfus, Oussar, Roussel, and Stone (2007). in IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (Cascadilla, Honolulu, HI)] was applied to extract principal components of filtered images and linear regression to relate articulatory variation to its acoustic consequences. This technique was used to investigate the tongue movements involved in /æ/ production, in order to compare the tongue gestures involved in the various /æ/-raising patterns, and to relate them to their apparent phonetic motivations (nasalization, voicing, and tongue position).

Velarization of word‐initial /l/ in African American English.

Word‐initial /l/ was examined in African American English in North Carolina, with comparisons with European American English, archival interviews with ex‐slave African Americans and Spanish. The degree of velarization was measured using the F2‐F1 difference in Bark. Interactions with formant values of the following vowel and the duration of /l/ were examined. Past research has produced conflicting results. First, initial /l/ in English is regarded as relatively unvelarized, but some research has found it to be velar. Second, there is disagreement about whether velar or nonvelar /l/ shows greater duration. Third, there has been controversy over whether velarization of /l/ is categorical or scalar. Results showed that English speakers exhibited significantly more velarization than Spanish speakers. Moreover, the degree of velarization increased across generations of African Americans. Less velarized /l/ proved to show greater duration than more velarized /l/. Velarization was quite scalar: there was no disc...

Using ultrasound articulatory signals to investigate the phonetic motivations of English /æ/ tensing

A common simplifying technique in ultrasound studies of variation is to select a single representative frame for each token, sacrificing dynamic information that is often critical for understanding the phonetic motivations of phonological phenomena. We examine the phonetic motivations for tongue body raising in English /ae/ tensing (e.g., Labov et al. 2005) in 23 North American English speakers using phonetically meaningful time-varying articulatory signals extracted directly from ultrasound video. An articulatory measure of /ae/ tenseness is generated using regression to find the linear combination of articulatory principal components (found using EigenTongue Feature Extraction; Hueber et al. 2007) that best accounts for the F2-F1 difference in front vowels. We have previously shown (Carignan et al. 2015) that tensing before /m n/ involves tongue body raising that is timed to the vowel nucleus, whereas tensing before /ɡ ŋ/ involves anticipating the velar closure to different degrees in different dialects. ...