The ability to discern the use of a nonstandard dialect is often enough information to also determine the speaker's ethnicity, and speakers may consequently suffer discrimination based on their speech. This article, detailing four experiments, shows that housing discrimination based solely on telephone conversations occurs, dialect identification is possible using the word hello, and phonetic correlates of dialect can be discovered. In one experiment, a series of telephone surveys was conducted; housing was requested from the same landlord during a short time period using standard and nonstandard dialects. The results demonstrate that landlords discriminate against prospective tenants on the basis of the sound of their voice during telephone conversations. Another experiment was conducted with untrained participants to confirm this ability; listeners identified the dialects significantly better than chance. Phonetic analysis reveals that phonetic variables potentially distinguish the dialects.

No abstract

American sociolinguists have largely ignored obstruents as invariant, including how speakers distinguish /s, t/ from /z, d/. Upper Midwestern final obstruents provide clear evidence that the realization of such contrasts can and does vary. In a once German-speaking Wisconsin town, we have found that speakers systematically produce final laryngeal distinctions differently than reported for American English, with an apparent partial neutralization of the distinction. Here, we seek the historical antecedents of this pattern, comparing acoustic characteristics of recordings from speakers throughout the region born from 1866-1986. Analysis by date of birth shows distinct obstruent phonetics over this whole period, revealing striking changes in which acoustic cues have been exploited to maintain the distinction: The oldest speakers used primarily glottal pulsing, younger ones exhibit a "trading relation" between pulsing and preceding-vowel duration, and the youngest have reduced the acoustic cues of the distinction dramatically.This article provides evidence that the phonetics of laryngeal or "voicing" distinctions in regional American English, observable in minimal pairs sing~zing, bussing~buzzing, hiss~his, vary and change in systematic and previously unappreciated ways. Examination of multiple acoustic characteristics for the phonological voicing distinction in syllable codas indicates that the cues are used in tandem, and

A once predominantly German-speaking community in Watertown, Wisconsin,shows distinct phonetic and phonological traces of that immigrant heritage in the speech of its English-speaking monolinguals. Acoustic and perceptual studies suggest that speakers do not produce all the expected cues for English fi nal laryngeal distinctions, nor do they exploit those cues to the same degree as a set of control speakers. This instance, for which the language varieties and contact situation involved are all well understood, provides good evidence for structural influence from a substrate and provides a challenge to conventional views of language contact.

Old English underwent diachronic change in its vowel inventory between its predecessor West Germanic and Middle English. We provide an analysis of the addition and loss of vowels in Old English from the perspective of modified contrastive specification (Dresher et al. 1994). Three main themes emerge from our analysis: (i) the phonological representation of contrast in the vowels in English has remained remarkably stable for over a thousand years, (ii) the proposed analysis improves upon and supersedes similar analyses proposed in Dresher 2015 and Purnell & Raimy 2015, and (iii) the adoption of privative features provides an improved representationally based understanding of phonological activity, feature geometry, and how phonology reflects general cognitive features of memory.*