scholarly journals A Production Study on Controlled Coarticulation: A Case of Contextual Fronting of /u/ in American English

2010 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Reiko Kataoka
Keyword(s):  
American English ◽  
Production Study

Linking gender, sexuality, and affect: The linguistic and social patterning of phrase-final posttonic lengthening

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-216
Author(s):  
Lewis Esposito
Keyword(s):  
American English ◽  
Past Research ◽  
Gender Effect ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Social Forces ◽  
Production Study ◽  
The Social ◽  
Straight Women ◽  
Gender Based ◽  
Do So

AbstractThis paper furthers our understanding of the social forces driving prosodic variation by reporting on production and perception studies of phrase-final posttonic lengthening in American English. Building on past research showing gender-based variation in the production of phrase-final lengthening, I show that this gender effect surfaces only when comparing straight men and straight women. Gay men and straight women lengthen their phrase-final posttonic syllables equally, and both groups do so more than straight men. A matched-guise social-perception experiment shows that listeners associate increased lengthening not only with femininity and male gayness, but with expressive affect. I suggest that the link between increased lengthening and expressive affect is forged iconically and that this link underlies the gender and sexuality patterns observed in the production study. What surfaces from this work theoretically is how variability in expressions of affect may drive correlations between gender/sexuality-based categories and linguistic variants.

A production and perception study of /t/ glottalization and oral releases following glottals in the US

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-41
Author(s):  
David Ellingson Eddington ◽  
Earl Kjar Brown
Keyword(s):  
New Mexico ◽  
Social Factors ◽  
American English ◽  
Education Level ◽  
Us States ◽  
Production Study ◽  
The Us ◽  
Perceived Age ◽  
Glottal Stop ◽  
Study Participants

The articulation of /t/ in American English varies according to linguistic and extralinguistic factors. Concerning social factors, word-final /t/ glottalization is seen more among speakers of African American English (Farrington 2018), younger speakers (Partin-Hernandez 2005, Roberts 2006), and women (Byrd 1994, Eddington and Channer 2010). This paper examines the production and perception of /t/ in five US states: Indiana, Mississippi, New Mexico, Utah, Vermont. For the production study, participants read a letter containing 24 prenasal word-medial /t/s (e.g., kitten) and 28 prevocalic word-final /t/s (e.g., not ever). For the perception study, 22 speakers recorded a unique sentence, each of which was manipulated acoustically in order to yield both oral and nasal releases of prenasal word-medial /t/ (e.g. button [bʌʔən] vs [bʌʔn̩]), as well as tap and glottal stop pronunciations of prevocalic word-final /t/ (e.g. not ever [nɑɾɛvɚ] vs. [nɑʔɛvɚ]). Next, these recordings were presented to participants who rated the speakers in terms of their perceived age, friendliness, pleasantness, rurality, education level, and whether they were from the same state as the participants. The production results for prenasal word-medial /t/ (e.g. button) indicate that younger speakers produced oral releases more often than their older counterparts. Age also was related to the realization of prevocalic word-final /t/ as a glottal stop (e.g., not ever), such that younger speakers and women produced glottal stops more often than older speakers. In the perception study, speakers who used glottal stops were viewed as less educated and less friendly. Speakers who used oral releases were perceived as more rustic and less educated. This paper contributes to the literature documenting the production and perception of /t/ in American English and to the literature that demonstrates the usefulness of using both production and perceptual data to study language variation (e.g., Brown 2015).

Addressing African American English in Early Literacy Assessment and Instruction

2008 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 54-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole Patton Terry
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Early Literacy ◽  
American English ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Literacy Skills ◽  
African American English ◽  
Literacy Assessment ◽  
Learning To Read ◽  
Speech Language Pathologist ◽  
Early Literacy Assessment

Abstract Determining how best to address young children's African American English use in formal literacy assessment and instruction is a challenge. Evidence is not yet available to discern which theory best accounts for the relation between AAE use and literacy skills or to delineate which dialect-informed educational practices are most effective for children in preschool and the primary grades. Nonetheless, consistent observations of an educationally significant relation between AAE use and various early literacy skills suggest that dialect variation should be considered in assessment and instruction practices involving children who are learning to read and write. The speech-language pathologist can play a critical role in instituting such practices in schools.

Zero Marking of Past Tense in Child African American English

2014 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 173-181 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryan Lee ◽  
Janna B. Oetting
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American English ◽  
African American English ◽  
Current Paper ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Grammatical Function

Zero marking of the simple past is often listed as a common feature of child African American English (AAE). In the current paper, we review the literature and present new data to help clinicians better understand zero marking of the simple past in child AAE. Specifically, we provide information to support the following statements: (a) By six years of age, the simple past is infrequently zero marked by typically developing AAE-speaking children; (b) There are important differences between the simple past and participle morphemes that affect AAE-speaking children's marking options; and (c) In addition to a verb's grammatical function, its phonetic properties help determine whether an AAE-speaking child will produce a zero marked form.

Recent change in non-present perfect constructions in British and American English

Corpora ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-135 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xinyue Yao ◽  
Peter Collins
Keyword(s):  
American English ◽  
Recent Change ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Present Perfect ◽  
British English ◽  
Spoken English ◽  
Communicative Functions ◽  
General Decline ◽  
Modal Auxiliaries

A number of recent studies of grammatical categories in English have identified regional and diachronic variation in the use of the present perfect, suggesting that it has been losing ground to the simple past tense from the eighteenth century onwards ( Elsness, 1997 , 2009 ; Hundt and Smith, 2009 ; and Yao and Collins, 2012 ). Only a limited amount of research has been conducted on non-present perfects. More recently, Bowie and Aarts’ (2012) study using the Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken English has found that certain non-present perfects underwent a considerable decline in spoken British English (BrE) during the second half of the twentieth century. However, comparison with American English (AmE) and across various genres has not been made. This study focusses on the changes in the distribution of four types of non-present perfects (past, modal, to-infinitival and ing-participial) in standard written BrE and AmE during the thirty-year period from the early 1960s to the early 1990s. Using a tagged and post-edited version of the Brown family of corpora, it shows that contemporary BrE has a stronger preference for non-present perfects than AmE. Comparison of four written genres of the same period reveals that, for BrE, only the change in the overall frequency of past perfects was statistically significant. AmE showed, comparatively, a more dramatic decrease, particularly in the frequencies of past and modal perfects. It is suggested that the decline of past perfects is attributable to a growing disfavour for past-time reference in various genres, which is related to long-term historical shifts associated with the underlying communicative functions of the genres. The decline of modal perfects, on the other hand, is more likely to be occurring under the influence of the general decline of modal auxiliaries in English.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document