Effects of gender and regional dialect on prosodic patterns in American English

Abstract

While cross-dialect prosodic variation has been well established for many languages, most variationist research on regional dialects of American English has focused on the vowel system. The current study was designed to explore prosodic variation in read speech in two regional varieties of American English: Southern and Midland. Prosodic dialect variation was analyzed in two domains: speaking rate and the phonetic expression of pitch movements associated with accented and phrase-final syllables. The results revealed significant effects of regional dialect on the distributions of pauses, pitch accents, and phrasal-boundary tone combinations. Significant effects of talker gender were also observed on the distributions of pitch accents and phrasalboundary tone combinations. The findings from this study demonstrate that regional and gender identity features are encoded in part through prosody, and provide further motivation for the close examination of prosodic patterns across regional and social varieties of American English. Keywordsprosody; intonation; regional dialects; gender; American English IntroductionHistorically, the focus of most research on regional variation in American English has been on lexical and segmental sources of variability based on fieldworker transcriptions of interview speech (e.g., the Linguistic Atlas projects, the Dictionary of American Regional English). Although more recent research has moved away from impressionistic transcriptions and has adopted acoustic analysis techniques to document and describe regional and ethnic variation in the United States, the research remains largely focused on segmental sources of variability, particularly in the vowel system. For example, Thomas' (2001) Publisher's Disclaimer: This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final citable form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain. Similar to the studies of prosodic characteristics in dialects of other languages, studies of prosodic variation in varieties of English have examined a range of phenomena. For example, speaking rate differences between New Zealand and American English varieties were examined by Robb, Maclagan, and Chen (2004), who found that New Zealand English speech was significantly faster than American English speech in terms of overall speaking rate (including pauses) and articulation rate (excluding pauses). Robb et al. (2004) attributed the effect of dialect on speaking rate to differences in vowel quality between New Zealand and American English and suggested that those vowel quality differences may also produce differences in rhythm across these varieties, although they did not explicitly test their hypothesis. ...

New Information in Naturalistic Data Is Also Signalled by Pitch Movement: An Analysis from Monolingual English/Spanish and Bilingual Spanish Speakers

“…It should also be pointed out that most studies in intonation use a small number of speakers from which to analyze data, despite the fact that interspeaker variability is well known to be problematic. Studies such as Arvaniti & Garding for English (2007) use 13 speakers, the studies they mention in their article vary from an undefined number, to two, to five speakers (2007:5) ;Sluijter & van Heuven (1996) use 6 speakers, Clopper & Smiljanic (2011) use 10 speakers -all considerably smaller numbers of speakers than those analyzed in our study, which takes data from 29 speakers (10 for monolingual Spanish, 10 for bilingual Spanish, and 9 for monolingual southern California English). 7.…”

“…One such function is concerned with signaling information structure. Crucially, the indicators of different information-structural states typically also have functions unrelated to the packaging of information in an utterance (Féry 2007:162), such as the marking of sociolinguistically relevant information (Warren & Daly 2000, Daly & Warren 2001Clopper & Smiljanic 2011) and are subject to constraints imposed on them by their physical expression (cf., e.g., Ohala 1983, Cruttenden 1997, Gussenhoven 2007). This means that the different functions of information-structural devices and their encoding give rise to potentially complex interactions with other grammatical or semantic components and their physical correlates, whose interpretation is language-/dialect-/variety-specific (cf.…”

“…A frequent counterargument to the use of (such more) naturalistic speech is that it is supposed to provide less robust data sets (Butragueño 2004, Clopper & Smiljanic 2011). However, not only can the same be true of the supposedly less noisy experimental conditions -see for instance, the constructed sentences read by Röhr & Baumann's participants, which produced rather noisy data (2010:4) -but we are using statistical methods that are well-suited to handle the kinds of interrelated and potentially noisy data that arise from (more) naturalistic samples.…”

Prosodic characteristics of different varieties of Brazilian Portuguese

“…In studies concerning different dialects or varieties from different languages, prosody has not been widely considered, since the main focus remains on phonological and lexical differences [5]. The same situation is valid for BP.…”

“…Reference [5] studied prosodic variability in different dialects of American English. The authors claimed that in the US, researchers are largely focused on segmental sources of variability.…”