Back Vowel Dynamics and Distinctions in Southern American English

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.

Formant Trajectory Patterns of American English /l/ Produced by Adults and Children

Purpose Most acoustic and articulatory studies on /l/ have focused on either duration, formant frequencies, or tongue shape during the constriction interval. Only a limited set of data exists for the transition characteristics of /l/ to and from surrounding vowels. The aim of this study was to examine second formant (F2) transition characteristics of /l/ produced by young children and adults. This was to better understand articulatory behaviors in the production of /l/ and potential clinical applications of these data to typical and delayed /l/ development. Method Participants included 17 children with typically developing speech between the ages of 2 and 5 years, and 10 female adult speakers of Southern American English. Each subject produced single words containing pre- and postvocalic /l/ in two vowel contexts (/i, ɪ/ and /ɔ, ɑ/). F2 transitions, out of and into /l/ constriction intervals from the adjacent vowels, were analyzed for perceptually acceptable /l/ productions. The F2 transition extent, duration, and rate, as well as F2 loci data, were compared across age groups by vowel context for both pre- and postvocalic /l/. Results F2 transitions of adults' /l/ showed a great similarity across and within speakers. Those of young children showed greater variability, but became increasingly similar to those of adults with age. The F2 loci data seemed consistent with greater coarticulation among children than adults. This conclusion, however, must be regarded as preliminary due to the possible influence of different vocal tract size across ages and variability in the data. Conclusions The results suggest that adult patterns can serve as a reliable reference to which children's /l/ productions can be evaluated. The articulatory configurations associated with the /l/ constriction interval and the vocal tract movements into and out of that interval may provide insight into the underlying difficulties related to misarticulated /l/.

Linguistic Employment Niches: Southern Dialect across Industries

The authors examine how linguistic niches may develop in certain industries. Using acoustic measurement techniques, the authors examine the extent to which workers in different industries display dialect features associated with the American South. The data are drawn from 190 semistructured sociolinguistic interviews from 2008 to 2017. Six linguistic variables were constructed to measure dialect features associated with southern American English. The results show that workers who are employed in the technology industry display significantly fewer southern dialect features than workers in interactive service work, law, and government. The general movement away from southern American English over time was also more prominent among technology workers. These results suggest that newer and more professional industries display less traditional patterns of southern speech. While the results do not support causal claims, they imply that individuals tend to work in industries that match their linguistic and cultural backgrounds.

Acquisition and Acoustic Patterns of Southern American English /l/ in Young Children

Purpose The aim of the current study was to examine /l/ developmental patterns in young learners of Southern American English, especially in relation to the effect of word position and phonetic contexts. Method Eighteen children with typically developing speech, aged between 2 and 5 years, produced monosyllabic single words containing singleton /l/ in different word positions (pre- vs. postvocalic /l/) across different vowel contexts (high front vs. low back) and cluster /l/ in different consonant contexts (/pl, bl/ vs. /kl, gl/). Each production was analyzed for its accuracy and acoustic patterns as measured by the first two formant frequencies and their difference (F1, F2, and F2-F1). Results There was great individual variability in /l/ acquisition patterns, with some 2- and 3-year-olds reaching 100% accuracy for prevocalic /l/, while others were below 70%. Overall, accuracy of prevocalic /l/ was higher than that of postvocalic /l/. Acoustic patterns of pre- and postvocalic /l/ showed greater differences in younger children and less apparent differences in 5-year-olds. There were no statistically significant differences between the acoustic patterns of /l/ coded as perceptually acceptable and those coded as misarticulated. There was also no apparent effect of vowel and consonant contexts on /l/ patterns. Conclusion The accuracy patterns of this study suggest an earlier development of /l/, especially prevocalic /l/, than has been reported in previous studies. The differences in acoustic patterns between pre- and postvocalic /l/, which become less apparent with age, may suggest that children alter the way they articulate /l/ with age. No significant acoustic differences between acceptable and misarticulated /l/, especially postvocalic /l/, suggest a gradient nature of /l/ that is dialect specific. This suggests the need for careful consideration of a child's dialect/language background when studying /l/.

Prestige and Prejudice

This article examines Danes’ attitudes towards selected accents of English drawing on data from an experiment where 21 Danes were asked to evaluate speakers of Australian English, Received Pronunciation (RP), General American (GA), Southern American English and Danish-accented English. It is argued that Danes have internalised multiple stereotypes about speakers of these accents and that the media play a vital role in the creation and reinforcement of these stereotypes. It is also argued that RP is considered the most prestigious accent of English, that GA is considered the most ‘standard’ accent of English and that Danish-accented English is disliked by Danes.

Dative Country

This article explores geographical variation in a range of understudied dative constructions in American English. It shows that these constructions are found primarily in the South and that they permit numerous syntactic variations and permutations. However, not all sentences and constructions have an equal status. In particular, the authors find that they lie on a continuum of markedness. More marked variants are judged acceptable by fewer speakers and have a more limited geographic distribution. And yet, even the most marked variants cannot be dismissed: the strong geographic nature of their distribution shows that they are a genuine part of the grammar of many speakers. Overall, this research contributes a more detailed picture of dative constructions in American English and a more nuanced picture of syntactic variation in Southern American English; moreover, the authors offer a novel approach to measuring geographical markedness in syntactic variation.

Rate effects on Southern American English VOT

This study examines the effect of speaking rate on VOT durations of initial stops in Southern American English (SAE). English is claimed to have a two-way contrast between long-lag (fortis) and short-lag (lenis) stops, but lenis stops in SAE have been shown to be produced with prevoicing rather than short-lag VOT. This study examines whether SAE lenis stops are specified for privative voice or if prevoicing is an example of contrastive emphasis. Similar to rate effects found in other languages, the data here support the conclusion that SAE does have phonologically specified privative voice in the lenis stop.