Tyler Kendall

Variation in perception and production of mid front vowels in the U.S. Southern Vowel Shift

Abstract Looking at speech perception from a sociolinguistic perspective, the paper first explores how speakers from three different regions in the U.S. perform on a vowel identification task for a continuum between /e/ and /ɛ/. Following the general analysis of cross-regional perception, we turn our focus to a subsample of Southern participants who also provided speech data, investigating the nature of the link between their speech production and perception for these vowels. In particular, we are interested in the extent to which participation in a series of shifts affecting the Southern speech region in production (the Southern Vowel Shift or SVS) affects perception in that region. The data includes a set of seven siblings and we also examine whether sibling status affects perceptual variability. Our results suggest that region does play a significant role in mediating perception, particularly in the South, and that SVS participation in production is related to differences in perception within that region, suggesting that both individual and community based norms are crucial in speech processing. Finally, identifying a large amount of familial variability in both perception and production, we find that siblinghood does not seem to play a greater role in speech perception similarity than shift participation.

On the History and Future of Sociolinguistic Data

Recordings of natural speech play a central role in the diverse subdisciplines of linguistics. The reliance on speech recordings is especially profound in sociolinguistics, where scholars have developed a range of techniques for eliciting and analyzing natural speech. However, sociolinguists have rarely focused explicitly on the storage, management, and preservation of their data – the interfaces to their data – and this lack of focus has had consequences for the advancement of the field. In this essay, I briefly review the history of datamanagement practices within sociolinguistics, insofar as these practices have been discussed in the literature. I then propose new ways to consider and approach natural speech recordings as data for sociolinguistic analysis and provide examples from the North Carolina Sociolinguistic Archive and Analysis Project, a Web-based digitization and preservation project, to highlight the analytical as well as theoretical benefits of more rigorous considerations of ‘data’ within sociolinguistics.

Durational and spectral differences in American English vowels: Dialect variation within and across regions

Spectral differences among varieties of American English have been widely studied, typically recognizing three major regionally diagnostic vowel shift patterns [Labov, Ash, and Boberg (2006). The Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change (De Gruyter, Berlin)]. Durational variability across dialects, on the other hand, has received relatively little attention. This paper investigates to what extent regional differences in vowel duration are linked with spectral changes taking place in the Northern, Western, and Southern regions of the U.S. Using F1/F2 and duration measures, the durational correlates of the low back vowel merger, characteristic of Western dialects, and the acoustic reversals of the front tense/lax vowels, characteristic of Southern dialects, are investigated. Results point to a positive correlation between spectral overlap and vowel duration for Northern and Western speakers, suggesting that both F1/F2 measures and durational measures are used for disambiguation of vowel quality. The findings also indicate that, regardless of region, a durational distinction maintains the contrast between the low back vowel classes, particularly in cases of spectral merger. Surprisingly, Southerners show a negative correlation for the vowel shifts most defining of contemporary Southern speech, suggesting that neither spectral position nor durational measures are the most relevant cues for vowel quality in the South.

Local and External Language Standards in African American English

This investigation attempts to determine the social distribution and contextual shifting of African American English (AAE) within rural Southern African American communities. The study compares selective diagnostic AAE variables and features of speech rate and pause in the speech of three recognized sociopolitical leaders in public presentations and sociolinguistic interviews. The results show that there are not significant shifts in the use of AAE from the sociolinguistic interview to the public presentation settings and that leaders do not necessarily align their speech with their age and sex cohorts in terms of vernacular AAE usage. The authors conclude that the relative autonomy of the community, its endocentric versus exocentric orientation, the primary public service constituency of the leader, the different social affiliations and divisions within the community, the speaker’s personal background and history, and the socialized demands and expectations for public presentation are all factors in understanding the leaders’ use of local vernacular and mainstream standard variants.

Regional relationships among the low vowels of U.S. English: Evidence from production and perception

The unconditioned merger of the low back vowels and the variety of realizations found for the low front vowel have been noted as leading to greater distinctiveness across U.S. English regional dialects. The extent to which the movements of these vowels are related has repeatedly been of interest to dialectology as well as phonological theory. Here, examining production and perception data from speaker-listeners across three major regions of the United States, the relationships among these low vowels within and across regions are investigated. Participants provided speech samples and took part in a vowel identification task, judging vowels along a continuum from /ae/ to /ɑ/. Results of acoustic analysis and statistical analysis of the perception results indicate that a structural relationship between /ae/ and /ɑ/ is maintained across regions and that listeners’ own degree of low back vowel merger predicts their perception of the boundary between /ae/ and /ɑ/.

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...

Engagement Through Data Management and Preservation: The North Carolina Language and Life Project and the Sociolinguistic Archive and Analysis Project

This chapter considers the ways that enhanced data management and preservation practices improve linguistic engagement processes and procedures. Data management and engagement are often considered separate professional enterprises with different goals and methods, but we argue that there is indeed an underlying intersection between these activities. We examine this potential by discussing a model established for North Carolina, one of the most linguistically diverse states in the United States. We consider how the outreach endeavors of the North Carolina Language and Life Project, including the recent book, Talkin’ Tar Heel: How our Voices Tell the Story of North Carolina (Wolfram and Reaser, Talkin’ Tar Heel: How Our Voices Tell the Story of North Carolina. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), interrelate with the Sociolinguistic Archive and Analysis Project, a large-scale sociolinguistic data management project.

Vowel Dynamics in the Southern Vowel Shift

Southern varieties of English are known to be affected by the Southern Vowel Shift (SVS), which alters the positional relationship between the front tense/ lax system. However, previous work on the SVS generally limits its focus to steady state formant measures. Possible links between these shifts and dynamic trajectory distinctions have largely been unexplored despite widespread recognition that Southern vowels are dynamic in nature. The current article uses data from three Southern states (Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia) to ask to what extent does spectral onset position (the typical measure of SVS participation) correlate with internal spectral dynamics in the SVS. Analysis methods include a series of spectral measures (vector length, trajectory length, spectral rate of change and vector angle), which capture vowel inherent dynamics and vowel directionality. Results support the utility of looking at dynamic measures to better understand the fuller extent of vowel changes that occur with the SVS and lend support to recent calls to include nonstatic measures in sociophonetic analyses more generally. keywords: sociophonetics, spectral dynamics, Southern drawl, vowel inherent spectral change, regional variation Speech is not a static process, but an active one, and it is clear that many properties cannot be understood unless we examine their dynamic aspects. —Ladefoged and Maddieson (1996, 6) The southern vowel shift (SVS), a vocalic pattern characterizing English in the southeastern United States, has been well documented since Labov, Yaeger, and Steiner’s (1972) early acoustic work (e.g., Feagin 1986; Thomas 1989, 2001; Labov 1991, 1994, 2001; Fridland 1999, 2001, 2012; Dodsworth and Kohn 2012; Fridland and Kendall 2012, 2015; Kendall and Fridland 2012; Koops 2014). In brief, the SVS refers to a number of changes that affect several parts of the vowel system, including the acoustic repositioning of the front lax and tense vowel pairs /i / ~ /I/ and /e/ ~ /E/, high and mid Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/american-speech/article-pdf/93/2/186/534375/0930186.pdf by guest on 08 April 2019 Vowel Dynamics in the Southern Vowel Shift 187 back vowel fronting, and /aI/ monophthongization. The changes in the front vowel subsystem are particularly relevant in terms of distinguishing the contemporary Southern vowel system and will be the focus of the current work. The majority of sociophonetic research on vowels has focused on the first two formants (F1 and F2) and, in particular, static measurements of these formants at vowel nuclei. These are known to reflect primary cues to vowel identity (Labov, Yaeger, and Steiner 1972; Thomas 2001) and indeed represent key aspects of vowel quality. However, as the introductory Ladefoged and Maddieson (1996) quotation suggests, speech is an active process and its dynamic aspects need to be examined if we are to understand fully its properties. As such, recent sociophonetic work has considered a wider range of acoustic features in characterizing regional (and other) vowel differences (Fox and Jacewicz 2009; Wassink 2006, 2015). In this vein, the current project seeks to utilize measures that capture different aspects of vowel differences to better understand the role that dynamics play in the SVS. In folk linguistics, Southern speakers are often described as speaking with a “drawl,” characterized by slow speech and “drawn out vowels” (Preston 1986, 1989, 1993), suggesting dynamics are socially salient cues for Southern speech. While little sociolinguistic research has empirically examined the “Southern drawl” (Allbritten 2011; Koops 2014), this kind of folk commentary likely draws, at least somewhat, from an acoustic reality. In fact, the front lax vowels /I/ and /E/, two of the vowels often undergoing SVS changes, are found to have longer durations in the South when compared to other regions (Clopper, Pisoni, and de Jong 2005; Fox and Jacewicz 2009; Fridland, Kendall, and Farrington 2014), as well as exhibiting “breaking,” or becoming triphthongal (Feagin 1986; Allbritten 2011; Koops 2014). However, beyond sporadic mention of the Southern drawl (Sledd 1966; Feagin 1986, 1987; Wetzell 2000; Allbritten 2011) or studies of /aI/ monophthongization (Fridland 2003; Thomas 2003), very little linguistic work on Southern speech has focused on dynamics. The traditional characterization of the SVS is based on single point F1/F2 measures, usually in terms of a vowel nucleus or midpoint, despite wide acknowledgment that vowels in Southern speech are characterized by different dynamics than vowels elsewhere (Fridland 2012). It is surprising that there is a distinct lack of work done on vowel dynamic properties despite the potential relevance of trajectory information in maintaining phonemic distinctions for the front tense and lax vowel pairs (Kingston and Diehl 1994). This leads to the present project, which focuses on a primary research question: to what extent is the SVS characterized by differences that involve dynamics and not just vowel positions? The current analysis addresses this question about the role of dynamics in the SVS by applying a suite of quantitaDownloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/american-speech/article-pdf/93/2/186/534375/0930186.pdf by guest on 08 April 2019 american speech 93.2 (2018) 188 tive measures to production recordings from Southern speakers from three states with a focus on the front vowel subsystem. These measures capture (1) spectral onset position, (2) vowel inherent dynamics, and (3) glide directionality to examine how the SVS is characterized by vowel dynamics beyond typical nuclei measures. Results indicate that while single point measures can identify speakers as shifted or nonshifted, a number of other, nonstatic features also correlate with those measures, likely providing a more robust set of cues to Southern shifted speech. The quantitative measures that reflect dynamicity and glide direction, used together, provide a more complete encapsulation of what it means when we say a speaker has Southern shifted (SVS) vowels and better capture what specific linguistic cues are conveying the folk linguistic sense of “the drawl.” While our substantive focus here is on the dynamic properties of the SVS affected vowels, this work offers more evidence of the import of looking beyond F1/F2 measures for sociophonetic studies of vowels for other language varieties.

Collocational patterns of disfluencies in native and non-native speech: Evidence from the Wildcat Corpus

While disfluencies are generally considered a natural part of spontaneous speech, patterns of disfluencies in non-native (NN) speech could contribute to making that speech sound less proficient or less “fluent”. NN speech has been described as having more frequent and longer pauses, pauses at within-clause boundaries, shorter mean length of runs, and slower speech rate, compared to native (N) speech (e.g., Riggenbach, 1991; Trofimovich & Baker, 2006). However, in order to understand what makes NN disfluency patterns unique, it is important to examine such phenomena locally by examining the contexts of different types of disfluency. In the present study, we describe what features collocate with disfluencies in spontaneous English dialog. We examine speech from the Wildcat Corpus (Van Engen et al., 2010) which includes English dialogue produced by various pairings of N and NN speakers (N-N, N-NN, or NN-NN). Specifically, we extract turn-internal disfluencies of several types (e.g., silent pause, filled paus...

Production and perception of the low vowels in American English

Two vowel features are especially pivotal in defining contemporary U.S. dialects: The merger of the low back vowels and the variable realizations of the low front vowel. Several scholars (Bigham 2010, Gordon 2005, Labov, Ash and Boberg 2006) suggest a relationship between the low front and low back vowels such that /ae/ raising and subsequent fronting of /ɑ/ in the North inhibits the tendency toward low back merger. However, little work examines the robustness of this “structural linkage” or whether a similar relationship obtains across different regional varieties. Further, little work examines whether differences in production correlate with differences in regional perception patterns. Here, we compare the low vowel system across U.S. regional dialects and also consider interrelationships (i.e., correlations) between low vowel categories using data from eight fieldsites across the U.S. We then look at what these speakers’ perceptions of category shift between the low front and low back vowel tells us abo...