Persistence in the Production of Linguistic Variation

This dissertation, which is situated in broad debates over the delineation of abstract grammatical knowledge from the use of language in context, argues for distinct but interacting contributions from grammatical, psychological, and social factors in the production of intraspeaker linguistic variability. The phenomenon under investigation is the tendency of speakers to repeat recently-used linguistic options in conversational speech, which I refer to as persistence. I take up three major themes: the use of persistence as evidence on the mental-representational unity of variable linguistic processes; the interaction of different loci of variation with different cognitively-rooted facilitatory effects; and the contextual sensitivity of persistence to both social and grammatical expectations. The core results of this dissertation are based on data from 122 interviews drawn from the Philadelphia Neighborhood Corpus (Labov & Rosenfelder 2011). I argue for distinct phonological and morphological processes in the production of the common morphophonological variables ING (working/workin\u27), TD (old/ol\u27), and DH (them/dem/\u27em), with morphological variation showing generalized persistence while phonological variation is persistent only under conditions of lexical repetition. Specifically, I propose that verbal and nominal ING constitute distinct variables, as do past tense and monomorphemic TD, and that the alternation between stop and continuant consonants in DH is morphological in nature. The quantitative decay profiles of these variables, I suggest, tie their phonological versus morphological loci to their representation in episodic versus abstract memory systems. Although the driving force behind persistence, in this view, is the operation of various general cognitive processes, I further argue that these processes reflect speakers\u27 sociolinguistic awareness in a way that supports a holistic expectation-based view of persistence asymmetries. The quantitative results and new questions in this dissertation set the stage for continued progress toward an integrated model of how social, grammatical, and psychological forces contribute to the production of linguistic variation

The Impact of Higher Education on Philadelphia Vowels

This paper investigates fine-grained differences among those who go on for post-secondary education in Philadelphia. Our subjects are eight South Philadelphians whose backgrounds are similar but who differ in their pursuit of post-secondary education. We distinguish not only between high school and college education, but also between community colleges, regionally-oriented universities, and nationally-oriented universities. We examine four vowel features characterized by different degrees of social evaluation. We show that only the socially-salient vowel features, tense /aeh/ and tense /oh/, are subject to correction, while changes in progress below the level of social awareness (checked /ey/-raising and /uw/-fronting) are not. We argue that dialect accommodation is mediated by social factors, rather than the inevitable outcome of mechanistic processes. Speakers who are motivated by the promise of upward mobility and exposed to a variety of non-local accents modulate their speech away from Philadelphia features that are socially salient, but not from features below the level of consciousness

Weak Hand Variation in Philadelphia ASL: A Pilot Study

In this pilot study of variation in Philadelphia ASL, we connect two forms of weak hand variability to the diachronic location asymmetries that Frishberg 1975 observed for changes between one- and two-handed sign realizations. We hypothesize that 1) variable weak hand involvement is a pathway for change from one- to two-handed and thus should be more frequent for body signs than head signs, and 2) variable weak hand lowering is a pathway for change from two- to one-handed and thus should be more frequent for head signs than body signs. Conversational data from four signers provides quantitative support for hypothesis (1) but not (2). We additionally observe differences in weak hand height based on sign location and one/two-handedness. The results motivate further work to investigate the possibility that weak hand involvement is a mechanism for diachronic change in sign languages

Perceptual learning, talker specificity, and sound change

Perceptual learning is when listeners hear novel speech input and shift their subsequent perceptual behavior. In this paper we consider the relationship between sound change and perceptual learning. We spell out the connections we see between perceptual learning and different approaches to sound change and explain how a deeper empirical understanding of the properties of perceptual learning might benefit sound change models. We propose that questions about when listeners generalize their perceptual learning to new talkers might be of of particular interest to theories of sound change. We review the relevant literature, noting that studies of perceptual learning generalization across talkers of the same gender are lacking. Finally, we present new experimental data aimed at filling that gap by comparing cross-talker generalization of fricative boundary perceptual learning in same-gender and different-gender pairs. We find that listeners are much more likely to generalize what they have learned across same-gender pairs, even when the different-gender pairs have more similar fricatives. We discuss implications for sound change

Intra- and Interspeaker Repetitiveness in Locative Variation

A long research line in quantitative sociolinguistics has been aimed at understanding how persistence, the tendency for people to repeat a linguistic variant they have just used, influences language variation and change. Previous studies have variously attributed variant repetitiveness to priming in the psycholinguistic sense, socially-motivated style-shifting, or interspeaker accommodation, implying that intraspeaker persistence and interspeaker convergence are potentially different phenomena. This study reports both interspeaker convergence and intraspeaker persistence in a morphological variable that has been recently documented in the Chengdu dialect of Mandarin, a variety which is subject to language contact with standard Mandarin. We compare the relationship between repetitiveness within and across speakers. Results from mixed-effect logistic regression show that there is a persistence effect within speakers and a convergence effect across speakers; however the size of the effect varies according to different meaning contexts. Findings further shed light on the understanding of language change from psycholinguistic perspectives

Preface

The University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics (PWPL) is an occasional series published by the Penn Linguistics Club. The series has included volumes of previously unpublished work, or work in progress, by linguists with an ongoing affiliation with the Department, as well as volumes of papers from NWAV and the Penn Linguistics Colloquium. This volume contains selected papers from NWAV 39, held from November 4-6, 2010 in San Antonio, TX at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Alphabetic thanks go to Claire Crawford, Aaron Ecay, Lauren Friedman, Kyle Gorman, Soohyun Kwon, Marielle Lerner, Laurel MacKenzie, and Hilary Prichard for help in editing. Since Vol. 14.2, PWPL has been an internet-only publication. Since Vol. 13.2, PWPL has been published both in print and online gratis via ScholarlyCommons@Penn. Due to the large number of hits these online papers have received, and the time and expense of managing a back catalog of PWPL volumes, the editorial committee decided in 2008 to cease print publication in favor of wider-scale free online dissemination. Please continue citing PWPL papers or issues as you would a print journal article, though you may also provide the URL of the manuscript. An example is below: Acton, Eric K. 2011. On Gender Differences in the Distribution of um and uh. U. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics 17.2: Selected Papers from NWAV 39, ed. M. Tamminga, 1-9. http://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/vol17/iss2/2 Ultimately, the entire back catalog will be digitized and made available on ScholarlyCommons@Penn. Publication in the University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics (PWPL) does not preclude submission of papers elsewhere; copyright is retained by the author(s) of individual papers. The PWPL editors can be contacted at:U. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics 619 Williams Hall, University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104–6305 [email protected]://ling.upenn.edu/papers/pwpl.html Meredith Tamminga Issue Edito

Modulation of the following segment effect on English coronal stop deletion by syntactic boundaries

Variable deletion of word-final coronal stops in English is strongly conditioned by whether the following segment is a consonant or a vowel. This paper uses corpus data to show that this following segment effect is weaker across strong syntactic boundaries (such as between independent matrix clauses) than across weak syntactic boundaries (between a verb and its direct object). This result is argued to be compatible with the Production Planning Hypothesis: that following context effects on phonological variation can be bled by failure to encode the next word in time for it to influence an alternation. Further, the interaction of boundary and following segment is asymmetric; the deletion-inhibiting effect of a following vowel is significantly weakened across stronger syntactic boundaries, while the deletion rate before consonants is more stable across different boundary types. The asymmetry provides new evidence in favor of syllabification-based explanations for why coronal stop deletion exhibits the following segment effect

Weak Hand Variation in Philadelphia ASL: A Pilot Study

In this pilot study of variation in Philadelphia ASL, we connect two forms of weak hand variability to the diachronic location asymmetries that Frishberg 1975 observed for changes between one- and two-handed sign realizations. We hypothesize that 1) variable weak hand involvement is a pathway for change from one- to two-handed and thus should be more frequent for body signs than head signs, and 2) variable weak hand lowering is a pathway for change from two- to one-handed and thus should be more frequent for head signs than body signs. Conversational data from four signers provides quantitative support for hypothesis (1) but not (2). We additionally observe differences in weak hand height based on sign location and one/two-handedness. The results motivate further work to investigate the possibility that weak hand involvement is a mechanism for diachronic change in sign languages

Persistence in the production of linguistic variation

This dissertation, which is situated in broad debates over the delineation of abstract grammatical knowledge from the use of language in context, argues for distinct but interacting contributions from grammatical, psychological, and social factors in the production of intraspeaker linguistic variability. The phenomenon under investigation is the tendency of speakers to repeat recently-used linguistic options in conversational speech, which I refer to as persistence. I take up three major themes: the use of persistence as evidence on the mental-representational unity of variable linguistic processes; the interaction of different loci of variation with different cognitively-rooted facilitatory effects; and the contextual sensitivity of persistence to both social and grammatical expectations. The core results of this dissertation are based on data from 122 interviews drawn from the Philadelphia Neighborhood Corpus (Labov & Rosenfelder 2011). I argue for distinct phonological and morphological processes in the production of the common morphophonological variables ING (working/workin\u27), TD (old/ol\u27), and DH (them/dem/\u27em), with morphological variation showing generalized persistence while phonological variation is persistent only under conditions of lexical repetition. Specifically, I propose that verbal and nominal ING constitute distinct variables, as do past tense and monomorphemic TD, and that the alternation between stop and continuant consonants in DH is morphological in nature. The quantitative decay profiles of these variables, I suggest, tie their phonological versus morphological loci to their representation in episodic versus abstract memory systems. Although the driving force behind persistence, in this view, is the operation of various general cognitive processes, I further argue that these processes reflect speakers\u27 sociolinguistic awareness in a way that supports a holistic expectation-based view of persistence asymmetries. The quantitative results and new questions in this dissertation set the stage for continued progress toward an integrated model of how social, grammatical, and psychological forces contribute to the production of linguistic variation