Phonetic evidence for sound change in Quebec French

Yaeger-Dror, Malcah

doi:10.1017/cbo9780511659461.016

Cited by 43 publications

(19 citation statements)

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“…Talkers exhibit individual variability at just about any linguistic level investigated –including, for example, pronunciation (e.g., Allen, Miller, & DeSteno, 2003; Bauer, 1985; Harrington, Palethorpe, & Watson, 2000; Yaeger-Dror, 1994), lexical preferences (e.g., Finegan & Biber, 2001; Roland, Dick, & Elman, 2007; Tagliamonte & Smith, 2005), and syntactic preferences (e.g., the frequency with which they use passives, Weiner & Labov, 1983). Therefore, talkers are also likely to differ in how they use quantifiers.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Talker-specificity and adaptation in quantifier interpretation

Yildirim

Degen

Tanenhaus

et al. 2016

Journal of Memory and Language

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Linguistic meaning has long been recognized to be highly context-dependent. Quantifiers like many and some provide a particularly clear example of context-dependence. For example, the interpretation of quantifiers requires listeners to determine the relevant domain and scale. We focus on another type of context-dependence that quantifiers share with other lexical items: talker variability. Different talkers might use quantifiers with different interpretations in mind. We used a web-based crowdsourcing paradigm to study participants’ expectations about the use of many and some based on recent exposure. We first established that the mapping of some and many onto quantities (candies in a bowl) is variable both within and between participants. We then examined whether and how listeners’ expectations about quantifier use adapts with exposure to talkers who use quantifiers in different ways. The results demonstrate that listeners can adapt to talker-specific biases in both how often and with what intended meaning many and some are used.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Talker-specificity and adaptation in quantifier interpretation

Yildirim

Degen

Tanenhaus

et al. 2016

Journal of Memory and Language

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“…In addition to unfamiliar accents and talkers, listeners must adapt to global shifts in the phonetic characteristics of their own dialect community over time (Labov, 1994). Although some aspects of language change undoubtedly arise when children acquire a linguistic system that differs slightly from that of the previous generation (Senghas & Coppola, 2001;Singleton & Newport, 2004;Slobin, 1977), language change has also been documented within individual talkers, indicating that it is not strictly an intergenerational process (Bauer, 1985;Harrington, Palethorpe, & Watson, 2000;Yaeger-Dror, 1994). Furthermore, this change can be rapidly effected within a single talker on the basis of short-term exposure to phonetically different input: Sancier and Fowler (1997) found that a Portuguese-English bilingual's pronunciation in each language was altered after 6 months in a monolingual (Portuguese or English) setting.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Weckud Wetch of the Wast: Lexical Adaptation to a Novel Accent

Maye¹,

2008

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Two experiments investigated the mechanism by which listeners adjust their interpretation of accented speech that is similar to a regional dialect of American English. Only a subset of the vowels of English (the front vowels) were shifted during adaptation, which consisted of listening to a 20-min segment of the "Wizard of Oz." Compared to a baseline (unadapted) condition, listeners showed significant adaptation to the accented speech, as indexed by increased word judgments on a lexical decision task. Adaptation also generalized to test words that had not been presented in the accented passage but that contained the shifted vowels. A control experiment showed that the adaptation effect was specific to the direction of the shift in the vowel space and not to a general relaxation of the criterion for what constitutes a good exemplar of the accented vowel category. Taken together, these results provide evidence for a context-specific vowel adaptation mechanism that enables a listener to adjust to the dialect of a particular talker.

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“…In other cases, researchers have conducted longitudinal studies that focus on the consistency or inconsistency of individuals’ linguistic behavior over time and, therefore, that address the validity of the Apparent‐Time Construct's foundational assumption of vernacular stability. For Montréal French, and all working on the basis of the same corpora, see Blondeau (2001); Sankoff, Blondeau, and Charity (2001); Sankoff and Wagner (2006); Thibault and Daveluy (1989); Yaeger‐Dror (1994); among others. For speakers of diverse varieties of English, see Baugh (1996); Bowie (2005); Cukor‐Avila (2002); Harrington (2006, 2007); among others.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Apparent‐Time Construct and stable variation: Final /z/ devoicing in northwestern Indiana¹

José

2010

Journal of Sociolinguistics

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As real-time language data becomes increasingly available for sociolinguistic research, a growing number of studies are benefitting from it in order to study language changes in progress, some of which even explicitly seek to scrutinize the APPARENT-TIME CONSTRUCT itself. Vanishingly few real-time studies, however, have focused specifically on stable sociolinguistic variables, leaving an important gap in our understanding of the Apparent-Time Construct's abilities to model real-time facts. In an effort to address this gap, the present study analyzes a presumably stable sociolinguistic variable -final /z/ devoicing -in extreme northwestern Indiana through real and apparent time. A series of VARBRUL analyses indicate that this variable is, indeed, stable throughout the 20 years of real time covered by the data and that its stability is successfully modeled in apparent time. Additionally, similarities in /z/ devoicing between this community and some other communities where it has also been studied are identified and discussed.

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Phonetic evidence for sound change in Quebec French

Cited by 43 publications

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Talker-specificity and adaptation in quantifier interpretation

Talker-specificity and adaptation in quantifier interpretation

The Weckud Wetch of the Wast: Lexical Adaptation to a Novel Accent

The Apparent‐Time Construct and stable variation: Final /z/ devoicing in northwestern Indiana¹

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Phonetic evidence for sound change in Quebec French

Cited by 43 publications

References 0 publications

Talker-specificity and adaptation in quantifier interpretation

Talker-specificity and adaptation in quantifier interpretation

The Weckud Wetch of the Wast: Lexical Adaptation to a Novel Accent

The Apparent‐Time Construct and stable variation: Final /z/ devoicing in northwestern Indiana1

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The Apparent‐Time Construct and stable variation: Final /z/ devoicing in northwestern Indiana¹