Misinterpretation of African American English BIN by adult speakers of Standard American English

Range in the Use and Realization of BIN in African American English

“…Both Beyer et al’s (2015) results and Weldon’s (2019 , 2021 ) examples indicate that understanding the sound of BIN necessitates analyzing BIN within the context of the utterance it is part of, including phrase-level intonational phonology and phonetics. In addition, the effect of intonation on the acceptability of BIN constructions with a temporal adverbial underscores the need for jointly considering syntactic/semantic and phonological factors in approaching an understanding of BIN .…”

“… Rickford (1973) characterized BIN in terms of being “stressed” or receiving “emphatic stress” and Baugh (1983) described this as “phonemic stress.” BIN has also been described as receiving a “high tone” ( Spears, 2017 ) and being “marked by a high pitch intonational contour” ( Weldon, 2019 , p. 117). Spears (2017 , p. 162) also states that BIN is “not always stressed” and that there are varieties of AAE in which “ BIN always receives high tone (Spears, 2004a), which occurs with stress usually, but not always.” To our best knowledge, the only previously published acoustic analyses of BIN are Beyer et al (2015) , which provides a quantitative acoustic analysis of BIN , and Weldon (2019 , 2021 ), which includes two sample fundamental frequency (F0) contours (i.e., pitch tracks) of Sound Files 5.1 and 5.2 in Weldon (2021) . In shadowing of spoken BIN and been constructions, Beyer et al (2015) found that 23 self-identified AAE speakers in Puget Sound, Washington, pronounced BIN with relatively longer duration and intensity than been .…”

“… Spears (2017 , p. 162) also states that BIN is “not always stressed” and that there are varieties of AAE in which “ BIN always receives high tone (Spears, 2004a), which occurs with stress usually, but not always.” To our best knowledge, the only previously published acoustic analyses of BIN are Beyer et al (2015) , which provides a quantitative acoustic analysis of BIN , and Weldon (2019 , 2021 ), which includes two sample fundamental frequency (F0) contours (i.e., pitch tracks) of Sound Files 5.1 and 5.2 in Weldon (2021) . In shadowing of spoken BIN and been constructions, Beyer et al (2015) found that 23 self-identified AAE speakers in Puget Sound, Washington, pronounced BIN with relatively longer duration and intensity than been . Specifically, they found that in productions of 9 BIN versus 9 been sentences, the ratios of duration and intensity of BIN to duration and intensity over the entire utterance it appeared in were greater than for been .…”

“…Specifically, they found that in productions of 9 BIN versus 9 been sentences, the ratios of duration and intensity of BIN to duration and intensity over the entire utterance it appeared in were greater than for been . While Beyer et al (2015) did not analyze F0, Weldon (2019) displays sample F0 contours of “She BIN told me that” and “She BIN married” in Figures 13 .1 and 13.2; speaker characteristics are unspecified. Both examples show an utterance-initial high F0, dropping immediately into a small F0 peak on BIN (consistent with a high pitch accent on BIN ), followed immediately by a drop into a low plateau that extends across the remainder of the utterance.…”

“…Our second research objective was to build on Beyer et al (2015) to phonetically characterize the difference between BIN and been utterances, and also to lay initial phonetic groundwork for building on previous characterizations of BIN receiving a high tone (reviewed in Section 1.1), toward a phonological analysis of the intonation of BIN constructions. (See also Clopper & Smiljanic, 2011 , sec.…”