Vowel Dynamics in the Southern Vowel Shift

Farrington, Charlie; Kendall, Tyler; Fridland, Valerie

doi:10.1215/00031283-6926157

Cited by 56 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 41 publications

(89 reference statements)

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“…While we stress the importance of vowel dynamics, we acknowledge that we work under the assumption that vowel-inherent spectral change is perceptually relevant and sociolinguistically meaningful. Some work has been done to support this assumption in the Southern US (e.g., Fridland & Kendall 2012;Farrington, Kendall & Fridland 2018;Gunter, Vaughn & Kendall 2020;Jacewicz & Fox 2020), though we leave such perceptual work on DASS for the future.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Holt (2016) takes a different approach to analyze whether there is regional variation in formant dynamics within North Carolina. One analytic measure used was the spectral rate of change, which measures how quickly formants change and how that speed varies over the course of the duration of the vowel (Farrington, Kendall & Fridland 2018). Holt (2016) finds that European American speakers realize GOOSE and GOAT with different spectral rates of change, with speakers in western North Carolina having a lower rate of change (meaning more monophthongal vowels) than speakers in eastern North Carolina.…”

Section: The Role Of Dynamics In Back Vowelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Back Vowel Dynamics and Distinctions in Southern American English

Stanley

Renwick

Kuiper

et al. 2021

Journal of English Linguistics

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Southern American English is spoken in a large geographic region in the United States. Its characteristics include back-vowel fronting (e.g., in goose, foot, and goat), which has been ongoing since the mid-nineteenth century; meanwhile, the low back vowels (in lot and thought) have recently merged in some areas. We investigate these five vowels in the Digital Archive of Southern Speech, a legacy corpus of linguistic interviews with sixty-four speakers born 1886-1956. We extracted 89,367 vowel tokens and used generalized additive mixed-effects models to test for socially-driven changes to both their relative phonetic placements and the shapes of their formant trajectories. Our results reinforce previous descriptions of Southern vowels while contributing additional phonetic detail about their trajectories. Goose-fronting is a change in progress, with greatest fronting after coronal consonants. Goat is quite dynamic; it lowers and fronts in apparent time. Generally, women have more fronted realizations than men. Foot is largely monophthongal, and stable across time. Lot and thought are distinct and unmerged, occupying different regions of the vowel space. While their relative positions change across generations, all five vowels show a remarkable consistency in formant trajectory shapes across time. This study’s results reveal social and phonetic details about the back vowels of Southerners born in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: goose-fronting was well underway, goat-fronting was beginning, but foot remained backed, and the low back vowels were unmerged.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Role Of Dynamics In Back Vowelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Back Vowel Dynamics and Distinctions in Southern American English

Stanley

Renwick

Kuiper

et al. 2021

Journal of English Linguistics

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“… 2. Our recent and ongoing work (Farrington, Kendall, & Fridland, 2015; Fridland et al, 2014) has indicated that the low vowels are differentiated both within and among regions by durational and spectral distinctions beyond those captured by standard F1 and F2 measures. However, for sake of space, we limit our focus in this paper to measures relating to or derived from F1 and F2 measurements taken at vowel onsets. …”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 97%

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

Kendall¹,

Fridland

2017

Lang Var Change

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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 /æ/ to /ɑ/. Results of acoustic analysis and statistical analysis of the perception results indicate that a structural relationship between /æ/ and /ɑ/ is maintained across regions and that listeners’ own degree of low back vowel merger predicts their perception of the boundary between /æ/ and /ɑ/.

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“…Thus, we ask: do shorter /aɪ/ glides cooccur with -in productions? In our data, glide lengths for /aɪ/ vowels were measured as the Euclidean distance between normalized F1 and F2 values at the 20% and 80% points in each /aɪ/ vowel's duration (corresponding to the Vector Length measurement of JACEWICZ, 2009 andFARRINGTON et al, 2018).…”

Section: Additional Sociolinguistic Variants Examinedmentioning

confidence: 99%

Stylistically coherent variants: Cognitive representation of social meaning / Variantes estilisticamente coerentes: representação cognitiva de significados sociais

Vaughn

Kendall

2019

RELIN

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The perception of social meanings and styles is dependent upon the contributions of a constellation of multiple covarying sociolinguistic variants. This suggests that listeners maintain associations between stylistically coherent variants and their social meanings in mental representation. The present paper expands upon this notion, aiming to gain converging evidence from production as a way to explore the cognitive representations of variants and their social meanings more deeply. To do this, four American English speakers were asked to produce sentences containing (ING) words (as in talking vs. talkin’), in their –in and –ing variants, in a laboratory setting. Productions were acoustically analyzed to evaluate whether the speakers also manipulated other stylistically-linked variables, even though prompted only to manipulate (ING). The variant –in has been shown to index a range of social meanings in American English, including Southern and casual. Results demonstrate that speakers indeed modulated other variables beyond (ING) in ways that align with the Southern and casual social meanings of –in. That producing one variant (–in) could lead to stylistically congruent realizations of other variables suggests that speakers not only hold indexical linkages between variants and styles in mental representation, but that variants are also linked to variants of other variables through associations with those styles. A better understanding of social meaning in cognition provides an important base upon which to advance research on sociolinguistic perception.Keywords: covariation; social meaning; cognitive representation; style.Resumo: A percepção de significados sociais e de estilos depende das constribuições de uma constelação de múltiplas variantes sociolinguísticas em covariação. Isto sugere que os falantes mantêm associações entre variantes estilisticamente coerentes e seus significados sociais numa representação mental. O presente trabalho expande essa noção, com o objetivo de ganhar evidências advindas da produção como meio de explorar mais profundamente as representações cognitivas de variantes e de seus significados sociais. Para isso, quatro falantes de inglês norte-americano foram convidados a produzir sentenças que contêm variantes de (ING) (como em talking vs. talkin’ ‘falando’), em contexto de laboratório. As produções foram acusticamente analisadas no sentido de avaliar se os falantes também manipularam estilisticamente outras variáveis, ainda que houvessem sido instruídos a manipular apenas (ING). Trabalhos anteriores já mostraram que a variante –in indicia uma grande extensão de significados sociais em inglês norte-americano, incluindo sotaque sulista e casualidade. Os resultados mostram que os falantes de fato modulam outras variáveis além de (ING) que se alinham a esses significados sociais de –in. O fato de que a produção de uma variante pode conduzir a realizações estilisticamente congruentes de variantes de outras variáveis sugere que os falantes não apenas detêm associações indiciais entre variantes e estilos em sua representação mental, mas também que variantes de diferentes variáveis estão ligadas entre si na sua associação a tais estilos. Entender melhor a significação social de múltiplas variáveis na cognição oferece uma base importante na qual deve avançar a pesquisa sobre percepção sociolinguística.Palavras-chave: covariação; significado social; representação cognitiva; estilo.

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Vowel Dynamics in the Southern Vowel Shift

Cited by 56 publications

References 41 publications

Back Vowel Dynamics and Distinctions in Southern American English

Back Vowel Dynamics and Distinctions in Southern American English

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

Stylistically coherent variants: Cognitive representation of social meaning / Variantes estilisticamente coerentes: representação cognitiva de significados sociais

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