Sociophonetic factors of speakers’ sex differences in Voice Onset Time: a Florentine case study

The paper shows the results of a sociophonetic analysis of the so-called gorgia enfatica (Castellani, 1960), i.e. the allophonic presence of voiceless aspirated plosives in strong positions attested in the vernacular variety of the city of Florence. 24 native speakers were involved in a production test (read speech) followed by a perceptional counterpart (matched-guise and open-ended interview). A statistically significant relationship between male speakers and longer Voice Onset Times emerged from our quantitative analysis of production. This distribution was recognized by the speakers, that evaluated the trait using comments fit for a tentative reconstruction of an indexical field (Eckert, 2008). Our data corroborated the need for a sociophonetic shift in the research methods concerning the relation between speakers’ sex and VOT production (Oh, 2011

Disability and sociophonetic variation among deaf or hard-of-hearing speakers of Taiwan Mandarin

Variationist sociolinguistics has not paid much attention to linguistically pathologised groups. This thesis studies pathologised speech from a third-wave variationist perspective, exploring how oral deaf or hard-of-hearing (D/HH) speakers of Taiwan Mandarin invoke variation in spoken Mandarin to embody hearingness or deafness. This thesis is structured into three stand-alone journal articles bookended with introductory and conclusion chapters which tie them together in the broader picture of how disability can mobilise an agentive deployment of linguistic resources. This thesis starts with an examination of how pathologised speech has been approached in linguistics and discusses why we need a third-wave perspective, which foregrounds the agency of languagers, to make a valid sociolinguistic analysis of pathologised speech. The first of the three articles is built upon one of the traditional sociolinguistic methods, minimal pair reading task, to explore how five D/HH speakers perform themselves while being highly conscious of their own speech. Different from how minimal pair reading task is usually adopted in linguistics, this study does not adopt minimal pair reading task to report what a standard speech is, for D/HH speakers. Instead, the participants are informed that their participation in the reading task is to make hearing people recognise D/HH speech, thereby empowering D/HH communities. Results show that while a large portion of the participants believe they should speak like hearing people to empower themselves, not all of them do so in the reading task. The results presented here call for a delicate inspection of the heterogeneity among D/HH people in how they view their relationship with society. The second research reports the results of a "device-on/off'' experiment where 19 participants read aloud the same sentences with and without turning on their assistive devices. Different from how this experiment is usually used in clinical linguistics and audiology, this study takes speaker agency into consideration and considers auditory deprivation as a moment where the body is transformed into a disabled body. Half of the participants report they experience negative psychological feelings during auditory deprivation, while the others report they do not. With the affective displays, we learn that the change in vowel quality during auditory deprivation should not be considered completely driven by mechanistic processes. Instead, results show that participants who display negative affect toward auditory deprivation invoke a greater degree of /i/-backing that the others do, and the negative affective display should be understood as a microcosm of how the participants think of disability in general in everyday life. The final of the three articles explores topic-based linguistic variation in passage reading. 10 participants read aloud two passages: one is not relevant to deaf people, and the other is on the identity politics of D/HH communities, in terms of how hearing people oppress D/HH signers in a fictional kingdom. Rather than seeing passage reading as an activity where speakers neutrally transform written text into spoken language, this study invites the participants to share their thoughts about the identity politics passage. Six of the participants discuss the passage from a third person point of view, distancing themselves from the radical viewpoint of identity politics; the other four participants instead take the opportunity to condemn audism and share experiences with audism. Results show that when reading the deaf people-relevant passage, the former group shift to variants which index hearingness in their stylistic repertoires, and the latter group shift to variants indexing deafness to perform solidarity

Interviewer effects on the phonetic reduction of negative tags, innit?

This paper investigates interviewer effects on speakers’ use of full, reduced or coalesced variants of negative tags, e.g. it's a nice day, isn't it/int it/innit? Using a corpus of North East English containing interviews with a range of participants and interviewers, I examine whether speakers use more phonetically-reduced variants when interviewed by someone who is more familiar to them and speaks a variety of English more similar to their own. Quantitative variationist analysis reveals that these interviewer effects do have an impact on the variation and apply in addition to linguistic and social constraints. When speakers use more full variants, this is characteristic of either a more careful speech style or, in some contexts, so-called “foreigner-directed speech” both of which typically have less lenition and contraction than the vernacular. The findings of this study emphasise that through proper consideration of the effects that interviewers have on the data they collect, we can gain a more comprehensive, reliable interpretation of linguistic variation

Are words easier to learn from infant- than adult-directed speech? A quantitative corpus-based investigation

We investigate whether infant-directed speech (IDS) could facilitate word form learning when compared to adult-directed speech (ADS). To study this, we examine the distribution of word forms at two levels, acoustic and phonological, using a large database of spontaneous speech in Japanese. At the acoustic level we show that, as has been documented before for phonemes, the realizations of words are more variable and less discriminable in IDS than in ADS. At the phonological level, we find an effect in the opposite direction: the IDS lexicon contains more distinctive words (such as onomatopoeias) than the ADS counterpart. Combining the acoustic and phonological metrics together in a global discriminability score reveals that the bigger separation of lexical categories in the phonological space does not compensate for the opposite effect observed at the acoustic level. As a result, IDS word forms are still globally less discriminable than ADS word forms, even though the effect is numerically small. We discuss the implication of these findings for the view that the functional role of IDS is to improve language learnability.Comment: Draf

The prosody of negative yeah

Normally, yeah has positive polarity, but with a change in prosody, it can convey a negative stance (e.g., polite disagreement/rejection). This study examines acoustic-prosodic features of "negative yeah" in a stance-rich corpus of collaborative tasks. Four categories are identified based on degree of agreement/acceptance and distinguished by an interaction between pitch and intensity: while two groups have low, flat pitch, and two have high domed or dipping contours, this division is cross-cut by intensity, again low-flat vs. high domed. These patterns show that fine-grained stance analysis can reveal word-level acoustic patterns that are not apparent in coarser approaches.

Fighting \u27Stance\u27: The Role of Conversational Positioning in League of Legends (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) Discourse

For researchers, the study of video game players - how they behave, interact, and cooperate in a virtual world – presents a challenge: what methodologies are best suited to approaching these interactions? From a sociolinguistic approach, how do gamers converse, and what do these conversations reveal about epistemic, affective, and political relationships? This study uses John DuBois’ Stance Theory (2007) and recent modifications of it (Kiesling 2022), to analyze data gathered from the popular multiplayer online battle-arena (MOBA) game League of Legends. It focuses on in-game interlocutors’ conversation samples to show their positioning, intersubjective alignment, and evaluation of a constantly changing speech environment. DuBois’ Stance Triangle permits visualization of the stances taken within such chat-room interactions that focus on player comments concerning the game, game-playing, and other gamers (as well as themselves). In the search for stance identity, DuBois’ model specifically seeks to understand the alignment between interlocutors, the evaluation each interlocutor makes of the stance object, and the position each interlocutor takes with regard to that object. This study builds on the work of researchers in stance-based analysis of gaming discourse (Sierra 2016), multimodality (Collister 2012), and language acquisition (Bakos 2018). This triangulation model will be supplemented with other discourse and pragmatic analyses when necessary, to interpret the stance-taking in a rapidly changing online environment filled with stances often likely to be related to ethical positions and displays of commentary on a range of topics, including the meta-game skills and abilities of the players, and extra-game references, and the intersection of these concepts in the construction of attitudinal positioning, stancetaking, and inter-personal dynamics in a common goal-motivated speech environment

Distributional and Acoustic Characteristics of Filler Particles in German with Consideration of Forensic-Phonetic Aspects

In this study, we investigate the use of the filler particles (FPs) uh, um, hm, as well as glottal FPs and tongue clicks of 100 male native German speakers in a corpus of spontaneous speech. For this purpose, the frequency distribution, FP duration, duration of pauses surrounding FPs, voice quality of FPs, and their vowel quality are investigated in two conditions, namely, normal speech and Lombard speech. Speaker-specific patterns are investigated on the basis of twelve sample speakers. Our results show that tongue clicks and glottal FPs are as common as typically described FPs, and should be a part of disfluency research. Moreover, the frequency of uh, um, and hm decreases in the Lombard condition while the opposite is found for tongue clicks. Furthermore, along with the usual F1 increase, a considerable reduction in vowel space is found in the Lombard condition for the vowels in uh and um. A high degree of within- and between-speaker variation is found on the individual speaker level

Unnatural pedagogy : a computational analysis of children\u27s learning to learn from other people.

Infants rely on others for much of what they learn. People are a ready source of quick information, but people produce data differently than the world. Data from a person are a result of that person\u27s knowledgeability and intentions. People may produce inaccurate or misleading data. On the other hand, if a person is knowledgeable about the world and intends to teach, that person may produce data that are more useful than simply accurate data: data that are pedagogical. This idea that people have special innate methods for efficient information transfer lies at the heart of recent proposals regarding what makes humans such powerful knowledge accumulators. These innate assumptions result in developmental patterns observed in epistemic trust research. This research seeks to create a computational account of the development of these abilities. We argue that pedagogy is not innate, but rather that people learn to learn from others. We employ novel computational models to show that there is sufficient data early on from which infants may learn that people choose data pedagogically, that the development of children\u27s epistemic trust is primarily a result of their decreasing beliefs that all informants are helpful, and that innate pedagogy would not lead to more rapid learning. We connect results from the pedagogy and epistemic trust literatures across tasks and development, showing that these are different manifestations of the same underlying abilities, and show that pedagogy need not be innate to have powerful implications for learning

Vowel reduction in Russian: No phonetics in phonology

Much recent work concentrates on the role of sonority in the phenomenon of vowel reduction, capitalizing on the two facts that reduction involves raising and/or shortening and that higher vowels and schwa are normally interpreted as having low sonority. This paper presents a different approach to vowel reduction in Standard Russian. It is proposed that the apparent sonority-driven effects in Russian are epiphenomenal. In particular, reduction to schwa is outside of the domain of phonological computation in Russian, being an artifact of reduced duration. Other types of neutralization arising in vowel reduction are potentially amenable to a sonority-based analysis, but I argue that current approaches to sonority-driven reduction suffer from representational shortcomings. When these shortcomings are rectified, however, sonority is unnecessary as an explicit factor in vowel reduction: standard markedness mechanisms are enough to explain the data

Are affective speakers effective speakers? – Exploring the link between the vocal expression of positive emotions and communicative effectiveness

This thesis explores the effect of vocal affect expression on communicative effectiveness. Two studies examined whether positive speaker affect facilitates the encoding and decoding of the message, combining methods from Phonetics and Psychology.This research has been funded through a Faculty Studentship by the University of Stirling and a Fellowship by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD)