a postgridiots guide to sociophonetics · i labov looked at pronunciation of /au/ (as in out,...

A Postgridiots Guide to Sociophonetics

Danielle Turton

University of Manchester

Postgridiots Guide to Linguistics24th April 2012

http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/danielle.turton

Introduction

Traditional approaches

Acoustic phoneticsRecapping your phoneticsSociophonetic studiesFAVE

Articulatory phoneticsUltrasoundSociophonetic studies using ultrasoundTurton ongoing...

What is sociophonetics?

I The interface of sociolinguistics and phonetics.

I Highly empirical, like both of the fields it comes from.

I The term sociophonetics was first used in 1974.

Early sociolinguistic work

I In early sociolinguistic work on phonological variables, codingwas done auditorily i.e. by ear.

I This is still the case for some variables in many studies,particularly consonantal variables.

Labov in Martha’s Vineyard

I The first sociolinguistic study.

I Labov looked at pronunciation of /aU/ (as in out, house,trout) and /aI/ (as in while, pie, might)

I He noticed that locals had a tendency to pronounce thesediphthongs with a more central start point [@U, @I].

I The degree of centralisation was judged by ear.

Moving from the auditory to the acoustic

I More recently, perhaps due to the accessibility of programssuch as Praat (Boersma and Weenik, 2010), sociolinguistshave begun measuring stuff.

I This tends to be vowels for the most part.

I But consonants are also subjected to sociophonetic analysis.

Introduction




Measuring stuff

Vowels

Introduction




Pros and cons of acoustic analysis

Pros

I More accurate.Stuart-Smith’s (2007) studyof coding /r/ auditorilyshows that three differentphoneticians comes up withwildly different results.

I Can consider sound changein progress at veryfine-grained stages.

I Can look at gradient andcategorical changes.

I You can plot them on a nicegraph!

Cons

I Takes ages.

I Some phonetic knowledgerequired.

I May be unnecessary for abasic sociolinguistic study ofcertain consonants, e.g.(th)-fronting.

I It’s not reliable for allsounds. Liquids (/l/ and/ô/) are notoriously difficultto analyse acoustically.

Sociophonetic studies

I Baranowski’s (2007) study of Charleston involved a completeanalysis of speaker’s vowel systems, revealing a vowel shiftwhich was ongoing in this dialect.

I In their seminal paper, Turton and Ramsammy looked at thecentralisation of the happy vowel in Mancunian English.

I Hay and Maclagan’s (2010) study of intrusive /r/ in NewZealand found evidence that the process was existingalongside rhoticity at points in the dialect’s history.

I Kirkham (2011) measured differences in VOT in coronal stopsfor his Sheffield high school community of practice speakers.

I Erker (2012) showed that Spanish coda [s] is involved in bothcategorical and gradient sound changes.

I For his PhD thesis on dialects in upstate New York, Dinkin(2009) measured 57,464 vowels by hand.

Introduction




What is FAVE?

I Forced Alignment and Vowel ExtractionI Visit: http://fave.ling.upenn.edu for full detailsI Read Yuan and Liberman (2008) or Evanini (2009)

I FAVE takes an orthographically transcribed interview and spitsout a fully segmented, phonetically transcribed TextGrid inPraat.

I Then, automatic formant measurments can be take for all ofthe vowels. I’m seriously.

http://fave.ling.upenn.edu

FAVE-align

Input: Audio file and transcription

What FAVE does

I Connected to a dictionary whichhas phonetic transcriptions.

I Each phoneme paired with anacoustic model generated fromprior training

FAVE-alignOutput: Audio file and aligned TextGrid

FAVE-extractInput: Full phonetic transcription and audio alignment

FAVE-extract

Output:Vowel formant measurements

Really fun stuff has been produced with the help of FAVE:http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~joseff/phillymotion.html

http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~joseff/phillymotion.html

Future work with FAVE

I FAVE is based on the American phonemic system.

I However, it seems to work pretty well for British English.

I Newer programs (such as ProsodyAligner) claim to work forall dialects and all languages.

Articulatory phonetics

I Due to advances in technology, more recent sociolinguisticwork has ventured into the realms of articulatory phonetics.

I Articulatory phonetics: the study of what the articulatorsare doing, rather than studying the spectrogram.

I Types of equipment used:I MRII EMMAI Electroglottograph (EGG)I Electropalatography (EPG)I Ultrasound (sometimes rather unfortunately abbreviated to

UTI; ultrasound tongue imaging)

I Traditional sociolinguists steered clear of such approaches, asthey fail to overcome the Observer’s Paradox.

I More recently, advances in non-invasiveness have resulted insome interesting work.

Introduction




UltrasoundImages the tongue in the mouth.

Ultrasound methodologyWe draw a spline onto the tongue image on the screen.

These splines can be exported into a workspace, where you can runstatistical tests and differences in tongue shapes, or just generallyhave a browse.

Or make nice pictures

Introduction




Lawson et al. (2008, 2011)

I Lawson et al. looked at the possibility of derhoticisation inGlasgow. That is, have Glaswegians stopped pronouncingtheir postvocalic /r/s in words like car, farm?

I Auditory observation suggested so, but this is not enough tobe sure.

I They found an interesting result in many of their speakers:they had the tongue-tip raising gestures associated with /r/but with no r-ful auditory/acoustic consequences.

I Speakers were doing the tongue movement, but after voicinghad finished, making the /r/ impossible to hear.

I They found a nice social-class difference. This was a featureof working-class Glaswegians.

I Theoretical question: what happens to the next generation?

Introduction




Turts: My pilot study using ultrasound

I As I’m working with liquid consonants, the acoustic spectrumcan be problematic and unreliable.

I For my pilot study I’ve been collecting sentence data fromspeakers of all different dialects of English.

I My current investigation focusses on the realisation of /l/ indifferent phonological contexts.

I I’m interested in the process of /l/-darkening, whereby /l/ isproduced with a delayed and reduced tongue tip gesture.

RP

Cruttenden (2001) says that RP only has a dark [darkl] in absolutephrase-final position. That is, a dark [ë] in heal but a light [l] inheal it. Looks like he was right.

leap

heliumheal−ing

heal it

heal

Context a a a a ainitial intervocalic stemfinal−V final_V final

Middlesbrough

Middlesbrough shows the same pattern phonologically (only dark[ë]s in absolute final position, and before consonants) but anintermediate realisation phonetically.

leapheal

heal b

Context a a a a a ainitial intervocalic stemfinalV final_V final_B final

Dialects with very dark realisations

Manchester and America tend to have very dark [ë]s in all contextsoverall, however more in-depth analysis shows there are contextualdifferences (which I won’t go into today) which favour articulatoryanalysis over acoustic.

leap

heal

Context a a a a ainitial intervocalic stemfinalV final_V final

Figure: Manchester

heal

Context

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

initial

intervocalic

stemfinalV

final_V

final_H

final_B

final

Figure: America

References I

Baranowski, Maciej. 2007. Phonological variation and change in the dialect ofCharleston, South Carolina. 92. Duke University Press Books.

Boersma, Paul, and David Weenink. 2010. Praat: doing phonetics bycomputer .

Cruttenden, Alan, ed. 2001. Gimson’s pronunciation of English. London:Arnold, 6th edition.

Dinkin, Aaron. 2009. Dialect boundaries and phonological change in upstateNew York. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.

Erker, D. 2012. Of categories and continua: Relating discrete and gradientproperties of sociophonetic variation. University of Pennsylvania WorkingPapers in Linguistics 18:3.

Evanini, Keelan. 2009. The permeability of dialect boundaries: A case studyof the region surrounding erie, pennsylvania. Doctoral Dissertation, Universityof Pennsylvania.

References II

Hay, Jennifer, and Margaret MacLagan. 2010. Social and phoneticconditioners on the frequency and degree of intrusive /r/ in New ZealandEnglish. In A reader in sociophonetics, eds. Dennis Preston and NancyNiedzielski. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Kirkham, Sam. 2011. The acoustics of coronal stops in British Asian English.In Proceedings of the 17th International Congress of Phonetics Sciences(ICPhS).

Labov, William. 1972. Sociolinguistic patterns. Oxford: Blackwell.

Lawson, Eleanor, James M. Scobbie, and Jane Stuart-Smith. 2011. The socialstratification of tongue shape for postvocalic /r/ in Scottish English. Journalof Sociolinguistics 15:256–268.

Lawson, Eleanor, Jane Stuart-Smith, and James M. Scobbie. 2008.Articulatory insights into language variation and change: Preliminary findingsfrom an ultrasound study of derhoticization in Scottish English. University ofPennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 14:1524–1549.

References III

Stuart-Smith, Jane. 2007. A sociophonetic investigation of postvocalic /r/ inglaswegian adolescents. In Proceedings of the XVIth International Congress ofPhonetic Sciences, 1449–1452. Saarbrucken.

Turton, Danielle, and Michael Ramsammy. 2012. /I, @/-lowering inmanchest[2]: Contextual patterns of gradient variability. Paper given at the20th Manchester Phonology Meeting. Manchester, 24th-26th May 2012.

Yuan, Jiahong, and Mark Liberman. 2008. Speaker identification on theSCOTUS corpus. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 123:3878.

a postgridiots guide to sociophonetics · i labov looked at pronunciation of /au/ (as in out,...

Documents