PI Annette D’Onofrio and graduate students Jaime Benheim and Amelia Stecker attend NWAV 48 (New Ways of Analyzing Variation) on October 10-12, 2018 at the University of Oregon to present ongoing research projects. Check out the abstracts below, and don’t hesitate to reach out for information!
Experimental evidence for iconicity in variation
Iconicity is fundamental to sociolinguistic variation: intensification of a variant, whether through increased frequency of occurrence or phonetic intensification, intensifies its indexicality. Iconicity can also be involved in the choice of variant, playing on a variety of phonetic features such as hyperarticulation, fortition, lenition, acoustic frequency, and rhythm. Based on a series of social evaluation experiments, we provide evidence that hearers perceive a relation between acoustic frequency of a vowel and affective stance. We then move beyond the frequency code to show that consonant fortition — the coalescence of increased duration and amplitude of a stop burst — has a similar effect. Finally, we show that that rhythm — in particular, the presence of post-tonic lengthening in a word — can heighten that effect.
Gender, variant frequency, and social evaluations of speakers
Listeners are sensitive to the frequency at which speakers produce “non-standard” variants in utterances, reflected in their social evaluations of those speakers. Previous work also illustrates that women’s voices face greater scrutiny than men’s voices. However, the ways that a speaker’s gender may modulate a listener’s sensitivity to the frequency of “non-standard” variants remains to be explored. Using the variable ING, a matched-guise task was conducted to compare listeners’ evaluations of male and female speakers producing varying proportions of a “non-standard” ‘-in’ variant, investigating whether listeners evaluate men and women differently for using ‘-in’ at the same rates of production. Findings show that speakers’ greater usage of the ‘-in’ variant faces more negative evaluations from listeners, but this trend did not differ between different speaker genders. Rather, differences in evaluations of individual speakers persist across and within gendered categories, bearing implications for notions of binary gender and single-speaker matched-guise paradigms.
Regional features and the Jewish ethnolinguistic repertoire in Chicago
The Jewish American ethnolinguistic repertoire has been shown to include the use of New York City (NYC) regional features, even by speakers who live elsewhere. Less is known about how indexical links between NYC features and Jewish identity interface with the social meanings of regional features common to the communities outside of NYC in which Jewish speakers live. This study explores how Jewish Chicagoans’ vocalic systems integrate NYC- and Chicago-linked TRAP, LOT, and THOUGHT vowel productions. Evidence from production (wordlist) and perception (phoneme categorization) tasks reveal quantitative differences between Jewish and Catholic speakers’ LOT productions, and Orthodox vs. other Jewish listeners’ LOT perceptions. I argue that these differences are guided by LOT-fronting’s social meaning in Chicago more generally, and that the use of a given element from the ethnolinguistic repertoire can be influenced by that element’s pre-existing social meaning in a particular community.
Leave a Comment