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Part 1

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Background about Dialect studies – methodology and results

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Modern sociolinguistics – methodology and results

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Part 2

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Vowel measurement tutorial

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What are the different regional accents in your opinion?

Slide 8

Dialect Study Background

Linguistic variation and change

 Regional varieties described in terms of lexical choices done through Linguistic Atlas creation  Dialectologists looked at NORMs = old men in the sticks! (non-mobile old rural men)  Asked what is the word you use for...

 Plotted variation on a map and drew lines –

isoglosses (see image



)

 Now sociolinguists look at urban populations and exam different regions in terms of what is happening (lang change) in the cities

4 O’Grady, et al., 2010

5 Based on lexical variation: O’Grady, et al., 2010

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METHODOLOGY

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Now sociolinguists look at urban populations and identify language change (mostly phonological, mostly vowels)

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Dialects/accents are identified as a combination of changes, not necessarily unique pronunciations

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Atlas of North American English, Labov, et al., 2006 = large-scale dialect survey of NA English including speakers from most major urban areas

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http://www.ling.upenn.edu/phono_atlas/home.html

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cot

vs.

caught

(from Atlas of North American English, Labov, et al. 2006)

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9 O’Grady, et al., 2010

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METHODOLOGY

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Elicitation techniques – Sociolinguistic Interview

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Demographic information – need age, sex, social class (index from occupation, education, house price), social network (who speaker interacts with)

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Casual conversation (dyads or single interview) – try to get speaker to use vernacular by telling narratives (e.g., danger of death situation, what games played as kid, etc.)

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Formal Linguistic tasks

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Semantic differentials (

What’s the difference between a bunk and a cot?

)

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Minimal Pairs

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Reading passage (see website for standardized RPs)

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Word lists

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METHODOLOGY

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How do we know what to put on word lists?

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Labov’s historical word classes (see Labov to IPA page)

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When looking at vowels, need to look for the following phonetic contexts:

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Open or closed syllables for long vowels

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Before nasals

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(ay0) = [aj] before voiceless Consonants

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Vowels before /r/

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Vowels before /l/

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Regional Vowel Shifts

Linguistic variation and change

 Regional difference by vowel production shifts (language change) over time  Northern Cities Shift (play Chicago sample - 3mins) O’Grady, et al., 2010

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Regional Vowel Shifts

Linguistic variation and change

 The Southern Shift (Play Arkansas 2mins ; play Eng 3mins ; O’Grady, et al., 2010

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Regional Vowel Shifts

Linguistic variation and change

 The California/Canada Shift (Play Cali - 1:45; Ontario 2:15 ) O’Grady, et al., 2010

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Acoustic Analysis of Vowels

Background What are the English Vowels? Remember to consider historical word classes

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Slide 10

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Acoustic Phonetics

Acoustic characteristics of speech sounds (not articulatory) – rather than how they ’ re made how sounds sound Sound is waves (complex waves) = composed of a fundamental wave which repeats itself at the frequency of the opening and closing of vocal folds and a set of harmonic waves which repeat at frequencies which are multiples of the fundamental.

Make Sound by small variations in air pressure caused by vocal organs superimposed on airflow For Voiced Consonants & Vowels - Vocal folds chop up airstream, high and low pressure Fricatives - Narrow Constriction of blowing air with varying peaks of air pressure Sounds cause air particles to move, which makes tympanic membrane move (auditory)

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Acoustic Phonetics

In the production of vowels, the filtering effect of vocal tract produces amplitude peaks at certain frequencies by enhancing the harmonics (which are the component waves of a complex wave form) at those frequencies while dampening harmonics at other frequencies.

The peaks in the filter function are called

formants

(resonant frequencies of the vocal tract).

You can change the pitch of a vowel without changing the vowel quality (the rate of vibration of the air in the vocal tract [vowel] is independent of the rate of vibration of the vocal folds [pitch])

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Acoustic Phonetics

Acoustic analysis of vowels Whisper vowel corners to hear F2 Thump throat to hear F1     First formant (F1) represents vowel height (inversely) (dark band near bottom)- measure from middle of dark band vertically Second formant (F2) represents vowel front/back with the higher the F2, the fronter the vowel (2 nd dark band) – measure from middle of dark band Sound spectrograph - an instrument that translates a sound into a visual representation - called a spectrogram.

Waveforms and spectrograms - see Praat for vowel measurement and representation

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Acoustic Phonetics

Acoustic analysis of vowels

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Acoustic properties of vowels (from Mike Ward, 2003, master’s thesis at PSU)

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Acoustic properties of vowels (from Mike Ward, 2003, master’s thesis at PSU)

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Acoustic Analysis of Vowels

Single point measurement: One way to analyze vowels is to locate a single moment during the vowel that bests represents the target production (usually most extreme point) [There are other ways to measure vowels] See examples of single word vowel trajectories

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Acoustic Analysis of Vowels

When looking at spectrogram, look for maximum F1 and steady F2 (although not easy to find!) Also, avoid the very beginning/end of vowel due to consonant transitions (especially when preceding sound is labial or coronal) See examples in Praat Regarding methodology, it’s best for replicability to segment the large speech file into the individual words that you want to measure and save those as individual file

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Acoustic Analysis of Vowels

Praat – once you have the word isolated, try to find a representative LPC point (Linear predictive coding that identifies center of formant). Put the cursor there and select Query Log 2 to get info for that point Compile all the data organized by vowel type (using Labov’s word classes) and then come up with mean F1/F2 measurement for vowel Plot it on a chart (using Plotnik if you want) and then you get a picture of a speaker’s vowel space Comparing multiple speakers – need normalization (all sorts of trouble here!)

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Different Vowel Systems - Portland

C = syllable closed by Cons; F = free – vowel final; V = closed by voiced Cons or final; 0 = closed by voiceless Cons