Some acoustic cues for categorizing American English regional dialects

2001 ◽  
Vol 109 (5) ◽  
pp. 2292-2292
Author(s):  
Cynthia G. Clopper ◽  
David B. Pisoni
Keyword(s):  
American English ◽  
Acoustic Cues ◽  
Regional Dialects

Regional dialect perception across the lifespan: Identification and discrimination

2017 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth A. McCullough ◽  
Cynthia G. Clopper ◽  
Laura Wagner
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Young Children ◽  
New England ◽  
American English ◽  
Region Of Origin ◽  
Midwestern United States ◽  
Regional Dialects ◽  
Cognitive Difficulty ◽  
Regional Dialect

Although adult listeners can often identify a talker’s region of origin based on his or her speech, young children typically fail in dialect perception tasks, and little is known about the development of regional dialect representations from childhood into adulthood. This study explored listeners’ understanding of the indexical importance of American English regional dialects across the lifespan. Listeners between 4 and 79 years old in the Midwestern United States heard talkers from the Midland, Northern, Southern, and New England regions in two regional dialect perception tasks: identification and discrimination. The results showed that listeners as young as 4–5 years old understand the identity-marking significance of some regional dialects, although adult-like performance was not achieved until adolescence. Further, the findings suggest that regional dialect perception is simultaneously impacted by the specific dialects involved and the cognitive difficulty of the task.

Mapping Southern American English, 1861-1865

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Ellis
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Regional Differences ◽  
American English ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Past Participle ◽  
Regional Dialects ◽  
Regional Features ◽  
Individual Letter ◽  
Southern American English

Since April 2015 is the sesquicentennial of the end of the Civil War, now is a particularly appropriate time to review the progress of the Corpus of American Civil War Letters (CACWL) project and to suggest directions it might go in the future. Since 2007, we have located and collected images of nearly 11,000 letters and transcribed over 9,000 of these, totaling well over four million words. Of the transcribed letters, just over 6,000 were written by southerners (490 individual letter writers), a corpus extensive enough to begin identifying and describing what features were distinctively Southern in 19th-century American English. We have already mapped many of these features that are especially common in southern letters, for example, fixing to, howdy, past tense/past participle hope ‘helped’, qualifier tolerable, intensifier mighty, pronoun hit, and the noun heap. By way of comparison, we also have a somewhat smaller but rapidly growing collection of 3,000 transcribed letters written by individuals from northern states, and variant features from these letters are also being mapped. The work at present is very preliminary; there are thousands of additional letters to be collected and transcribed, particularly from northern states and from states west of the Mississippi. However, by mapping variants from letters that have already been transcribed, we can begin to get a better understanding of regional differences, as well as how regional features spread westward in the decades before the Civil War. We can also begin to obtain some sense of how American English in general, and particularly its regional dialects, may have changed since the mid 19th century. This article presents a preview of a number of those findings.

scholarly journals Acoustic cues for /θ/ in American English

1995 ◽  
Vol 98 (5) ◽  
pp. 2892-2892
Author(s):  
Nicholas Kibre ◽  
Kazue Hata
Keyword(s):  
American English ◽  
Acoustic Cues

scholarly journals English negative concord and double negation: The division of labor between syntax and pragmatics

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 53 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frances Blanchette ◽  
Marianna Nadeu ◽  
Jeremy Yeaton ◽  
Viviane Deprez
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Data ◽  
Division Of Labor ◽  
American English ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Acoustic Cues ◽  
Negative Concord ◽  
Double Negation

Recent research demonstrates that prototypical negative concord (NC) languages allow double negation (DN) (Espinal & Prieto 2011; Prieto et al. 2013; Déprez et al. 2015; Espinal et al. 2016). In NC, two or more syntactic negations yield a single semantic one (e.g., the ‘I ate nothing’ reading of “I didn’t eat nothing”), and in DN each negation contributes to the semantics (e.g. ‘It is not the case that I ate nothing’). That NC and DN have been shown to coexist calls into question the hypothesis that grammars are either NC or DN (Zeijlstra 2004), and supports micro-parametric views of these phenomena (Déprez 2011; Blanchette 2017). Our study informs this debate with new experimental data from American English. We explore the role of syntax and speaker intent in shaping the perception and interpretation of English sentences with two negatives. Our results demonstrate that, like in prototypical NC languages (Espinal et al. 2016), English speakers reliably exploit syntactic, pragmatic, and acoustic cues to in selecting an NC or a DN interpretation.

Vowel density differences among regional dialects of American English.

2011 ◽  
Vol 129 (4) ◽  
pp. 2452-2452
Author(s):  
Robert A. Fox ◽  
Ewa Jacewicz
Keyword(s):  
American English ◽  
Regional Dialects

Acoustic cues to stop coda voicing contrasts in 1 to 2‐year‐olds’ American English.

2009 ◽  
Vol 125 (4) ◽  
pp. 2570-2570 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Demuth ◽  
Stefanie Shattuck‐Hufnagel ◽  
Jae Yung Song ◽  
Karen Evans ◽  
Jeremy Kuhn ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
American English ◽  
Acoustic Cues

Articulatory Phonetics

2019 ◽  
pp. 285-301
Author(s):  
Sofia Alexandrovna Ivanova ◽  
Victoria Hasko
Keyword(s):  
English Language Learners ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
English Language ◽  
American English ◽  
Vowel Reduction ◽  
Regional Dialects ◽  
English Vowels ◽  
Articulatory Phonetics

This chapter focuses on the articulatory phonetics of English vowels; thus, it identifies descriptive parameters for vowel articulation in English, differentiates monophthongs and diphthongs, classifies the vowels of American English using these parameters, and addresses vowel reduction in American English. The theoretical material is followed by a pedagogical consideration of how the specifics of the articulatory characteristics of English vowels can be addressed in the classroom to facilitate comprehension and production of English vowels by English language learners. Supplementary materials are suggested for readers offering sample activities that could be used by language practitioners in ESL classrooms for this goal, as well as for exploring other dialects of English, including specific regional dialects falling under the umbrella of General American English, the variety addressed in this chapter.

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