The thematic coding of heritage bilinguals’ open end responses

In order to better understand the language attitudes and experiences heritage bilinguals have, and how these may impact their performance in a behavioral task, participants in my thesis studies were asked to answer open ended questions. This talk will discuss the process of thematically coding the responses, as well as the analysis done on the thematic coding to better understand patterns within participants as well as to see if there were correlations with their attitudes and their performance in the behavioral task.

Planning for the future and reacting to the present: proactive and reactive F0 adjustments in speech

A number of studies have examined whether speakers initiate longer utterances with higher F0. However, evidence for such effects is mixed and is mostly based on point estimates of F0 at the beginning of the utterance. Moreover, it is unknown whether utterance length can influence F0 control solely at the response onset or also during the response. We conducted a sentence production task to investigate how control of pitch register – F0 ceiling, floor, and span – is influenced by utterance length. Specifically, we test whether speakers adjust register both in relation to an initially planned utterance length – proactive F0 control – and in response to changes in utterance length that occur after response onset – reactive F0 control. Target sentences in the experiment had one, two, or three subject noun phrases, which were cued with visual stimuli. A novel manipulation was tested in which some visual stimuli were delayed until after participants initiated the response. Evidence for both proactive and reactive control of register was observed. Participants adopted a higher register ceiling and floor as well as a broader span in longer utterances. Furthermore, they decreased the amount of ceiling compression upon encountering delayed stimuli. These findings suggest the existence of a mechanism in which speakers continuously estimate the remaining length of the utterance and use that information to adjust pitch register.

Pitch Accent Variation and the Interpretation of Rising Declaratives

A well-known property of English is the encoding of pragmatic speech act meaning in the pitch pattern at the end of a prosodic phrase. A phrase with declarative syntax that ends in a falling pitch trajectory conveys an assertion, while a final rising pitch trajectory conveys a question. The pitch contour across this region of the phrase is the phonetic implementation of an abstract, phonologically specified, representation called the nuclear tune made up of the concatenation of high and low primitives: pitch accents and edge tones.

In this work from my dissertation I test competing accounts of the locus of intonational encoding of the question/assertion contrast. I examine both rising and falling tunes in the context of ongoing work on rising declaratives to determine which part of the pitch contour encodes this aspect of meaning: is it the region spanning the pitch accent or the region of the edge tones? Furthermore, in light of the pervasive variation in intonational form, I also investigate the degree to which variation in the phonetic implementation of the pitch accent and/or edge tones influences listener interpretation. Across three perception experiments, I find that the pitch accent of a tune does not contribute to assertive force. Rather, the distinction between assertive and inquisitive interpretations is cued primarily by the final F0 of the pitch contour regardless of the pitch accent, but that increased overall pitch prominence may trigger a salient focus interpretation that interferes with question/assertion interpretation, providing empirical support for leading compositional theories of intonational meaning.

Recognizing uptalk: Memory and metalinguistic commentary for a sociolinguistic feature

Metalinguistic commentary displays speakers’ stances toward linguistic styles and the social meanings cued by particular linguistic features, grounded in ideological framings of social types. Though some phonetic research has assumed explicit commentary to be irrelevant to individuals’ lower-level linguistic behavior and knowledge (see McGowan & Babel 2020), sociolinguistic studies have begun to examine the ways in which metalinguistic awareness corresponds to perceptual behavior (e.g. Campbell-Kibler 2012, Squires 2016, McGowan & Babel 2020). Theoretical models of sociolinguistic representation have posited metalinguistic commentary as a source for and result of cognitive links between linguistic forms and social meanings (e.g. Drager & Kirtley 2016). Memory processes involve mechanisms of encoding and recognition that are implicated in such theories of cognitive representations. Yet relatively little work has examined sociolinguistic memory directly. This project explores how listeners exhibit actual and false recognition of a metalinguistically-discussed linguistic feature, uptalk.

The ideological link between women’s voices and the rising prosodic contour known as uptalk has received academic as well as popular attention (e.g. Slobe 2018), though the implications for the social meanings of uptalk embedded in listeners’ mental representations of this linguistic feature is less known. To investigate the relationship between metalinguistic discourses of uptalk and listeners’ memory of this variable, this study uses a novel contour-recognition paradigm to test whether and how listeners remember uptalk, and how aspects of the context (voice differences, top-down metalinguistic priming) influence these recognition patterns.

In this experiment, 192 participants were exposed to multiple blocks of training passages, described as podcast recordings. Prior to the training passage, participants received one of three metalinguistic primes (or none in a baseline condition), stating that uptalk is more frequently produced by either a) men, b) women, or c) produced equally by speakers of all genders. Each training passage was then read by a different speaker. The passages were comprised of multiple utterances, some of which contain an uptalk contour, and some of which contain a falling contour. In each block, following the training passage, listeners completed an old-new judgment task of eight trials in which they heard one utterance, either in the same contour (rise or fall) as heard previously (old) or in a different contour than that heard previously (new). Participants’ attitudes toward uptalk and its social meanings were then collected via questionnaire. Speaker gender, old/new utterance status, fall/rise contour, and metalinguistic prime for the trials in the old-new judgment task were counterbalanced across 48 experimental lists, with 4 participants in each list.

This experiment examined whether listeners’ exhibited different rates of recognition for uptalk contours when prompted with different metalinguistic primes, and whether their prime interacted with listeners’ perceptions of their speaker’s gender. Specifically, analyses tested whether listeners’ old-new classification of rising contours was better when prompted with a particular prime, as well as when rising contours were produced by speakers perceived as women, suggesting relative salience of the ideological link between women’s voices and linguistic styles that include uptalk. Participants’ responses interacted with their prime such that participants receiving the female-biased prime exhibited greatest accuracy for rises previously produced by speakers perceived as women versus speakers perceived as men (p<0.05). Responses in other prime conditions were also conditioned by participants’ gender identity, such that female identifying participants’ accuracy mirrored their prime more closely than male-identifying participants and their primes (p<0.05). Overall, this study explores how metalinguistic awareness — both already held by participants and induced experimentally — can relate to patterns of recognition and thereby shape sociolinguistic representations.

Metrical Stress Theory: The Reboot

In this talk, I will revisit some of the key foundational concepts of metrical stress theory (Liberman 1975, Liberman and Prince 1977). I will argue for a distinction between phenomenal prominence (stress and accent) and metrical prominence (temporal prominence) with the primary purpose of phenomenal prominence being to indicate the positions of metrical prominence (and, therefore, overall metrical organization). I will draw on the theoretical and empirical literature on musical rhythm to support the distinction. In fleshing out the distinction, I will make several key claims about the nature and purpose of the two types of prominence. I will argue, for example, that the list of phenomena that might constitute stress or accent must go beyond the usual suspects—pitch, length, and loudness—to include phenomena like timbre (quality), voicing, and aspiration.  I will also argue that metrical patterns are always richly structured and that minimal phenomenal cues are necessary to indicate a particular rich metrical organization. One of the key consequences that this view has for our picture of the empirical terrain is that there are no single or dual prominence systems from a metrical perspective.

Social meaning and sound change

For features undergoing sound change, a speaker’s use of more or less conservative productions can index their orientation towards or away from the social meanings associated with those features. This talk examines how the associations that speakers make between phonetic variables and social meanings contribute to ongoing linguistic change. In Study 1, I discuss the results of a matched guise task aimed at eliciting Chicago-area adolescents’ social evaluations of features undergoing sound change among white Chicagoans (more or less Northern Cities-shifted TRAP or LOT vowels), finding that more conservative variants are associated with lower socioeconomic status in perception. In Study 2, I consider how these same features are recruited by white adolescents in production. Despite social evaluations linking these features with low SES, the type of high school a speaker attends is a better predictor of production of these vowels than socioeconomic background. Taken together, I argue that high school choice shapes students’ understandings of their own positionalities within the broader social and linguistic landscape, and that sound change over time involves adapting existing feature-meaning links to meet new social circumstances.