ENG 528: Language Change Research Seminar Sociophonetics: An Introduction Chapter 8: Combinations of Different Types of Variables

The General Problem Studies tend to focus on one variable or a few related variables Then they generalize and talk about social identities or patterns of linguistic change Phoneticians aren’t immune to this, either, though they have a better excuse A more holistic approach is needed

A Tangent from our Main Focus: Motor Theory Main proponent was the late Alvin Liberman He proposed that listeners perceive speech by relating sounds to articulation He also maintained that language users have a special speech module for doing that (Note that Chomsky, Liberman’s contemporary, is also a strong proponent of a “speech module”) Together, this approach is called the Motor Theory, and every phonetician needs to know what it is Both parts of the Motor Theory have been extensively disputed by various phoneticians and cognitians

Relating Different Variables to Cognition First of all, sociolinguists need to pay more attention to cognition We’ll spend much of the rest of the semester talking about how to do that Indefrey & Levelt (2004—just a general guide to neurolinguistics; you could find the same info in other guides): here, they cite some evidence that segmental specification may precede prosodic specification in speech production How would that relate to social meanings? Recall Labov’s (1972) division of variables into indicators, markers, and stereotypes; how does that fit with cognition?

Production Studies It’s relatively easy to extract adequate amounts of information on a variety of variables from most interviews (Of course, that doesn’t mean you can extract all variables from the average interview; lexical variables, for example, have to be specially elicited) Still, you can get a wide range of variables—segmental, prosodic, voice quality, morphosyntactic, and a few others—from most conversational interviews Statistical procedures such as MANOVA and Mixed Models are well equipped to analyze the results

An Example: Mexican American English in Pearsall, Texas Variable acquired by all English speakers, even first-generation: VOT patterns, /  N /-/  N / merger Variables that set first-generation English speakers off from younger Mexican Americans and from all Anglos: verbal past-tense marking, /t  /- /  / confusion, /æ/ realization, indistinct /i/-/  / and /u/-/  / differentiation Variables that set Mexican Americans off from Anglos: /o/ realization, /e/ realization, /  / realization, diphthongization of /ai/, /au/ nuclear realization, /l/ realization, degree of /ð/ and /  / stopping, prosodic rhythm, possibly intonation Variables that set some Anglos (especially older ones) off from other Anglos and from all Mexican Americans: degree of /ð/ assimilation, merger of /  r/ with /  r/ instead of with /or/, upgliding diphthongization of /æ:/ and /  / Variable that sets younger speakers of both ethnicities off from older speakers of both ethnicities: low back merger (/  /-/  /) Variable with more complex patterning, partly related to education: r- lessness

Perception Studies Practical problem with combining variables: the experiment rapidly gets too long You can create arrays of stimuli that feature two or three different variables; a synthesizer can be very handy for this For more than three or four variables, though, you may need to run separate experiments

An Example: Identification of African American and European American speakers

Questions for Discussion 1. What would be necessary for you to carry out a holistic study of speech production in a community if you’re familiar with which segmental variables are salient in the community but you don’t know which prosodic or voice quality features are? 2. Explain how you’d set up a perception test comparing the importance of several variables on identification of two ethnic groups—say, ancestral English and south Asian English speakers in London? Would you use spontaneous or read speech as the basis for the stimuli, and why?

References The diagrams on slide 8 are taken from: Thomas, Erik R., Norman J. Lass, and Jeannine Carpenter Identification of African American Speech. In Dennis R. Preston and Nancy Niedzielski (eds.), A Reader in Sociophonetics. Trends in Linguistics: Studies and Monographs 219. New York: De Gruyter Mouton Other references: Indefrey, P[eter], and W[illem] J. M. Levelt The spatial and temporal signatures of word production components. Cognition 20: Labov, William Sociolinguistic Patterns. Conduct and Communication 4. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Liberman, Alvin M., and Ignatius G. Mattingly The motor theory of speech perception revised. Cognition 21:1-36.