A survey of phonological mid vowel intuitions in Central Catalan

Catalan, like other Romance languages, has two pairs of phonemic mid vowels (/be/ “well” vs. /bɛ/ “lamb”; /os/ “bear” vs. /ɔs/ “bone”). However, these contrasts do not function like others in the language: they are partially phonologically conditioned, and evidence shows that words may be pronounced with different mid vowels by speakers of the same variety or even by the same speaker. Spanish may influence this instability, as first-language Spanish Catalan-Spanish bilinguals struggle to perceive and produce the contrast. This paper investigates the mid vowel contrasts in an Internet survey of vowel height judgments in 220 words by 146 Central Catalan-speaking individuals who also self-reported their language history. Results confirm that certain phonological contexts condition mid vowel height, typically favoring low mid judgments; where phonological conditioning occurs, speakers judge quality with increased consistency and confidence. Many words lacking phonological conditioning environments, however, are variable across speakers. Bilingualism levels and age have an effect: among Catalan-dominant participants, choice of mid vowel is affected by age, while participants with the highest Catalan dominance have greatest confidence in their intuitions. Variably-judged words are also phonetically variable, indicating a word-specific association between strength of phonological representation and realization

Variation in the lexical distribution and implementation of phonetically similar phonemes in Catalan

In some Romance languages with two pairs of mid vowel phonemes, it is acknowledged that these contrasts are somewhat unstable. We analyze the distribution and realization of the anterior and posterior mid vowels in Catalan to test claims (mostly based on anecdotal evidence) that these contrasts exhibit inter- and intraspeaker variability. Participants produced target words containing stressed mid vowels and, later, judged vowel height (/e/ vs. /e/; /o/ vs. /o/) in the same words. The results indicate that, even intradialectally, the distribution of mid vowels is somewhat variable , with speakers showing only moderate agreement in the distribution of phonemic vowels. In addition, speakers are not always consistent in their realization of mid vowels when they produce the same word (probably indicating weak phonolexical representations). Interspeaker variation was also observed in the phonetic implementation of the contrasts. The results indicate that the Catalan mid vowel contrasts, like those in other Romance languages, are weaker and less stable than other phonological oppositions

Analyzing dialect variation in historical speech corpora.

The Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States is an extensive audio corpus of sociolinguistic interviews with 1121 speakers from eight southeastern U.S. states. Complete interviews have never been fully transcribed, leaving a wealth of phonetic information unexplored. This paper details methods for large-scale acoustic analysis of this historical speech corpus, providing a fuller picture of Southern speech than offered by previous impressionistic analyses. Interviews from 10 speakers (∼36 h) in southeast Georgia were transcribed and analyzed for dialectal features associated with the Southern Vowel Shift and African American Vowel Shift, also considering the effects of age, gender, and race. Multiple tokens of common words were annotated (N = 6085), and formant values of their stressed vowels were extracted. The effects of shifting on relative vowel placement were evaluated via Pillai scores, and vowel dynamics were estimated via functional data analysis and modeled with linear mixed-effects regression. Results indicate that European American speakers show features of the Southern Vowel Shift, though certain speakers shift in more ways than others, and African American speakers' productions are consistent with the African American Vowel Shift. Wide variation is apparent, even within this small geographic region, contributing evidence of the complexity of Southern speech

Variation in the lexical distribution and implementation of phonetically similar phonemes in Catalan

In some Romance languages with two pairs of mid vowel phonemes, it is acknowledged that these contrasts are somewhat unstable. We analyze the distribution and realization of the anterior and posterior mid vowels in Catalan to test claims (mostly based on anecdotal evidence) that these contrasts exhibit inter- and intraspeaker variability. Participants produced target words containing stressed mid vowels and, later, judged vowel height (/e/ vs. /e/; /o/ vs. /o/) in the same words. The results indicate that, even intradialectally, the distribution of mid vowels is somewhat variable , with speakers showing only moderate agreement in the distribution of phonemic vowels. In addition, speakers are not always consistent in their realization of mid vowels when they produce the same word (probably indicating weak phonolexical representations). Interspeaker variation was also observed in the phonetic implementation of the contrasts. The results indicate that the Catalan mid vowel contrasts, like those in other Romance languages, are weaker and less stable than other phonological oppositions

Voices of coastal Georgia

The Southern dialect of American English has been characterized with a number of distinctive vowel features. These include what is known as the Southern Shift, in which /aɪ/ monophthongizes to /a:/; /æ, ɛ, ɪ/ are raised and fronted, while /i/ and /e/ are lowered and backed, and [oʊ, u] are fronted (Labov, Ash & Boberg 2006; Thomas 2001). Although these productions are widely accepted as representative features of Southern speech, the assertions that they are pervasive are actually based on a limited amount of mostly impressionistic data. The current study utilizes the Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States (LAGS), an extensive historical audio sociolinguistic corpus of interviews with 914 speakers collected from 1968-1983, to acoustically analyze the speech of ten speakers in the U.S. South (5M, 5F; mean age 63.7) to compare the predictions of the aforementioned shifts to the linguistic reality of speech production. Unlike previous studies of LAGS, which have largely relied on impressionistic transcriptions of target lexical items, this study relies on full interviews (mean length 3.5 hours). Results reveal wide individual variation in the adoption of specific Southern features, and overall a more complex picture of vowel production than traditional notions of Southern dialects suggest

A survey of phonological mid vowel intuitions in Central Catalan

Catalan, like other Romance languages, has two pairs of phonemic mid vowels (/be/ “well” vs. /bɛ/ “lamb”; /os/ “bear” vs. /ɔs/ “bone”). However, these contrasts do not function like others in the language: they are partially phonologically conditioned, and evidence shows that words may be pronounced with different mid vowels by speakers of the same variety or even by the same speaker. Spanish may influence this instability, as first-language Spanish Catalan-Spanish bilinguals struggle to perceive and produce the contrast. This paper investigates the mid vowel contrasts in an Internet survey of vowel height judgments in 220 words by 146 Central Catalan-speaking individuals who also self-reported their language history. Results confirm that certain phonological contexts condition mid vowel height, typically favoring low mid judgments; where phonological conditioning occurs, speakers judge quality with increased consistency and confidence. Many words lacking phonological conditioning environments, however, are variable across speakers. Bilingualism levels and age have an effect: among Catalan-dominant participants, choice of mid vowel is affected by age, while participants with the highest Catalan dominance have greatest confidence in their intuitions. Variably-judged words are also phonetically variable, indicating a word-specific association between strength of phonological representation and realization

Analyzing dialect variation in historical speech corpora.

The Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States is an extensive audio corpus of sociolinguistic interviews with 1121 speakers from eight southeastern U.S. states. Complete interviews have never been fully transcribed, leaving a wealth of phonetic information unexplored. This paper details methods for large-scale acoustic analysis of this historical speech corpus, providing a fuller picture of Southern speech than offered by previous impressionistic analyses. Interviews from 10 speakers (∼36 h) in southeast Georgia were transcribed and analyzed for dialectal features associated with the Southern Vowel Shift and African American Vowel Shift, also considering the effects of age, gender, and race. Multiple tokens of common words were annotated (N = 6085), and formant values of their stressed vowels were extracted. The effects of shifting on relative vowel placement were evaluated via Pillai scores, and vowel dynamics were estimated via functional data analysis and modeled with linear mixed-effects regression. Results indicate that European American speakers show features of the Southern Vowel Shift, though certain speakers shift in more ways than others, and African American speakers' productions are consistent with the African American Vowel Shift. Wide variation is apparent, even within this small geographic region, contributing evidence of the complexity of Southern speech

Static and dynamic approaches to vowel shifting in the Digital Archive of Southern Speech

Speech varies widely in the American South, but the region is argued to share features including monophthongization of upgliding diphthongs, convergence of certain front vowels via raising and lowering, and back-vowel fronting. We investigate the influence of speaker sex and ethnicity on vowel production using data from the Digital Archive of Southern Speech. This corpus of 64 linguistic interviews (372 hours, recorded 1968−1983) offers large amounts of data from individual speakers, whose semi-spontaneous nature reveals a more realistic portrait of phonetic variability than is typically available. Interviews of European- and African American speakers permit comparison of the Southern Vowel Shift with the African American Vowel Shift. We show using static, single-point static measurements and dynamic vowel trajectories that rates of front-vowel shifting differ across sexes and races; European American females typically show the most advanced shifts in front and back vowels. While rates of /aɪ/ monophthongization vary predictably across phonological contexts, this phenomenon is variably implemented and variable across speakers and states. Acoustic analysis of historical speech corpora offers perspective for modern sociophonetic studies, by providing a point of comparison to illuminate the development of modern regional variation, which will inform and enhance models of language change over time

Methods for transcription and forced alignment of a legacy speech corpus

This paper describes the transcription and forced alignment of the Digital Archive of Southern Speech (DASS), a subset of the Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States comprising 372 hours of recordings (64 interviews) conducted across eight southern U.S. states from 1968 to 1983. This project provides a large corpus of historical, semi-spontaneous Southern speech, time-Aligned to the audio for acoustic analysis. Manual orthographic transcription of full DASS interviews is carried out according to in-house guidelines that ensure consistency across files and transcribers. Separate codes are used for the interviewee, interviewer, nonspeech, overlapping and unintelligible speech. Transcriber output is converted to Praat TextGrids using scripts from LaBB-CAT, a tool for maintaining large speech corpora. TextGrids containing only the interviewee's speech are generated, and subjected to forced alignment by DARLA, which accommodates the levels of variation and noise in the DASS files with high degrees of success. Toward acoustic analysis, four methods for vowel formant extraction are evaluated: The native output of DARLA, FAVE, a local implemen-Tation of FAVE-Extract, and a Praat-based extractor that incorporates separate formant tracks for different regions of the vowel space. The workflow of transcription and analysis is presented to benefit other projects of similar size and scope

Methods for transcription and forced alignment of a legacy speech corpus

This paper describes the transcription and forced alignment of the Digital Archive of Southern Speech (DASS), a subset of the Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States comprising 372 hours of recordings (64 interviews) conducted across eight southern U.S. states from 1968 to 1983. This project provides a large corpus of historical, semi-spontaneous Southern speech, time-Aligned to the audio for acoustic analysis. Manual orthographic transcription of full DASS interviews is carried out according to in-house guidelines that ensure consistency across files and transcribers. Separate codes are used for the interviewee, interviewer, nonspeech, overlapping and unintelligible speech. Transcriber output is converted to Praat TextGrids using scripts from LaBB-CAT, a tool for maintaining large speech corpora. TextGrids containing only the interviewee's speech are generated, and subjected to forced alignment by DARLA, which accommodates the levels of variation and noise in the DASS files with high degrees of success. Toward acoustic analysis, four methods for vowel formant extraction are evaluated: The native output of DARLA, FAVE, a local implemen-Tation of FAVE-Extract, and a Praat-based extractor that incorporates separate formant tracks for different regions of the vowel space. The workflow of transcription and analysis is presented to benefit other projects of similar size and scope