The Albertan æ/ɛ shift and community grammars I Bag Your Pardon: The Albertan æ/ɛ shift and community grammars Jacqueline Jones & Stephen Winters Department of Linguistics, Languages, and Cultures Introduction Methodology For some speakers of Canadian English in Alberta, [æ] and [ɛ] have begun to merge before [g]. Similar mergers have been identified in Seattle and the American Midwest (Squizzero, 2009; Zeller, 1997). The purpose of the current study is threefold: (1) Describe the extent and direction of the change; (2) Identify speaker traits that may signal propagators and resistors of language change. (Eckert, 1989); (3) Examine the effects of modality of stimulus presentation on listener productions of [æ] and [ɛ] to determine the influence of self grammars and community grammars on the merger. Self Grammar refers to the unique internal representation of the sounds of a language an individual holds. It includes their indexical knowledge, perception grammars (Beddor, 2012), and self-productions. The Community Grammar describes a collection of Self Grammars belonging to a particular group. It may be perceived differently, depending on experience. Basic task: speakers produce [æ] and [ɛ] in words and non-words, preceding both [g] and other consonants, from prompts in three different modalities. 18 students at the University of Calgary between the ages of 19 and 26 were recorded. Participant recordings were labeled in Praat (Boersma, 2001). Formant values were normalized by speaker (Lobanov, 1971) and euclidean distances in F1/F2/F3 space were calculated between each token and the average F1-F3 values produced for [æ] and [ɛ] in calibration. Participants supplied demographic information and aligned themselves on personality binaries (e.g. Leader/Follower). Calibration: recordings were made of each speaker producing all Canadian English vowels in the [h_d] and [h_rd] frames. Production stimuli were presented in three different modalities: orthographic, auditory, and pictorial. Participants were presented with a stimulus and asked to read, repeat, or identify the object (or nonword) presented. Nonwords in the pictorial block were presented as simple equations of <picture> + <picture>, with the participant being asked to combine the two pictures into a new word. Hypotheses All stimuli in the orthographic and pictorial blocks contained [æg], [ɛg], [æk], or [ɛk]. The auditory block contained additional stimuli with [œg] or [œk]. Speaker Effects: females and speakers with dominant social identities (e.g. “Leaders”) will be more likely to accommodate to stimuli voices (Pardo 2006), while self-focused speakers (e.g. “Introverts”) will resist external influences. Modality Effects: Auditory stimuli will induce spontaneous phonetic imitation (SPI) (Goldinger, 1998; Babel, 2014) and the influence of the community grammar. Pictorial stimuli activate the self grammar. Productions in this block will most closely represent a speaker’s baseline vowels. Orthographic stimuli represent a “non-community” grammar, or the standard formal language. They will have a negligible effect on speaker productions. Pictorial Nonword training slide. Orthographic labels were not present in non-training stimuli Bibliography Babel, M., McGuire, G., Walters, S., & Nicholls, A. (2014). Novelty and social preference in phonetic accommodation. Laboratory Phonology-Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology 5.1:123-150. Beddor, Patrice S. (2012). Perception Grammars and Sound Change. The Initiation of Sound Change: Perception, Production, and Social Factors. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 37:55 Boersma, P. (2001). Praat, a system for doing phonetics by computer. Glot International 5:9/10:341-345. Eckert, P. (1989). Jocks and burnouts: Social categories and identity in the high school. Teachers College Press. New York, New York. Goldinger, S. (1998). Echoes of echoes? An episodic theory of lexical access. Psychological review 105.2:251. Labov, William. (2010). What is to be learned? Presented at NELS 41. Lobanov, B. M. (1971). Classification of Russian vowels spoken by different speakers. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 49(2B):606:608. Wassink, A. B., Squizzero, R., Scanlon, M., Schirra, R., & Conn, J. (2009). Effects of Style and Gender on Fronting and Raising of/æ/,/e:/and/ε/before/g/in Seattle English. Presented at NWAV 2009. Zeller, Christine. (1997) The investigation of a sound change in progress:/æ/to/e/in midwestern American English." Journal of English linguistics 25.2:142-155. Results Conclusions Half (9/18) of participants were identified as “Mergers.” T-tests showed no significant differences between their [æ] and [ɛ] formants at the 50% mark of each vowel. A significant (p < 0.01) positive correlation exists between speakers who merge [æ] and [ɛ] and places lived. The more widely travelled person, the more likely they are to merge (p < 0.01). Modality: vowels were produced closer to those in calibration when pictorial stimuli were presented first. All subjects shifted [æ] higher and fronter in the vowel space when preceding [g]. “Mergers” shifted [æ] even higher and fronter in their vowel space than calibration [ɛ]. All subjects shifted [ɛ] backer and lower in their vowel space when preceding [k]. For all subjects, [æ] before [g] was higher and fronter than [ɛ] before [k]. “For Non-Mergers”, the [æ] – [ɛ] contrast was smaller before both [g] and [k] than before [d]. The Alberta merger is complete for some individuals, but in-progress for others. Exposure to more dialects and changing situations in youth leads to greater tendency to merge. The influence of SPI can be reduced by recency effects of one’s self grammar. The effect of the Pictorial stimuli being presented first remains throughout further shifts in stimuli. Acoustic information (in auditory stimuli) has a stronger influence on participant vowels than indirect sound symbolism (in orthographic stimuli). The influence of the stimuli voice is stronger than the influence of ‘possible word formation’, but only in ambiguous contexts. jmjone@ucalgary.ca swinters@ucalgary.ca