Ethnolectal and generational differences in vowel trajectories: Evidence from African American English and the Southern Vowel System

Megan L. Risdal · Mary Kohn

19 citations0/0 files storedScholarly Commons (University of Pennsylvania)

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Linguistic Variation and Morphology Phonetics and Phonology Research Voice and Speech Disorders

Abstract

Despite their potential for elucidating fine-grained differences across ethnolects and regional dialects, vowel trajectories are neglected in sociolinguistics as group comparisons tend to rely upon F1/F2 steady-state measures. In this paper we demonstrate that comparisons of dynamic aspects of vowel production are crucial for comparing groups that may superficially align in steady-state production values. Specifically, we compare the front lax vowels BIT, BET, and BAT from the Southern Vowel Shift to those of the African American Vowel System in Piedmont, North Carolina. Data from eight older-generation European American participants from Raleigh, North Carolina, and twenty younger-generation African American participants from Piedmont, NC, come from sociolinguistic interviews. Using force-aligned TextGrids, F1 and F2 were semi-automatically measured at 21 equally-spaced time-points within each vowel. Functional data analysis was used to model vowel curvature for each group allowing for holistic descriptions of trajectory shape. Cubic coefficients, a measure of curvilinear contour shape, and their interaction with vowel duration were then compared through visual and statistical analysis. Our results reveal that SVS vowels for European Americans follow diphthongal trajectories, while African American vowels are more monophthongal. Interactions between duration and trajectory shape also differ across groups. As such, formant trajectories and other dynamic information form a central component of linguistic diversity in the region. Functional data analysis illustrates that differences in vowel formant trajectories are a key marker of regional sound systems and ethnolectal vowel variation in Southern English in the Piedmont region of North Carolina.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 19 citations exist upstream.

References

1995Acoustic characteristics of American English vowels 1971Classification of Russian Vowels Spoken by Different Speakers 2005Acoustic characteristics of the vowel systems of six regional varieties of American English 2009Individual differences in online spoken word recognition: Implications for SLI 2005The Atlas of North American English 2007Phonological and Phonetic Characteristics of African American Vernacular English 2012Urban rejection of the vernacular: The SVS undone 2002SOCIOPHONETIC APPLICATIONS OF SPEECH PERCEPTION EXPERIMENTS

Cited by

2018Mechanisms of Vowel Variation in African American English 2017Analyzing dialect variation in historical speech corpora 2017Folk Perception of African American English Regional Variation 2017Static and dynamic approaches to vowel shifting in the Digital Archive of Southern Speech 20219. SamePRICE, DifferentHOUSE 2020Introduction to the special issue on English in the Southern United States: Social factors and language variation

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.