Analysis of total vowel space areas in three regional dialects of American English

2008 ◽  
Vol 123 (5) ◽  
pp. 3068-3068 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert A. Fox ◽  
Ewa Jacewicz
Keyword(s):  
American English ◽  
Regional Dialects ◽  
Vowel Space

Regional dialect perception across the lifespan: Identification and discrimination

2017 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth A. McCullough ◽  
Cynthia G. Clopper ◽  
Laura Wagner
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Young Children ◽  
New England ◽  
American English ◽  
Region Of Origin ◽  
Midwestern United States ◽  
Regional Dialects ◽  
Cognitive Difficulty ◽  
Regional Dialect

Although adult listeners can often identify a talker’s region of origin based on his or her speech, young children typically fail in dialect perception tasks, and little is known about the development of regional dialect representations from childhood into adulthood. This study explored listeners’ understanding of the indexical importance of American English regional dialects across the lifespan. Listeners between 4 and 79 years old in the Midwestern United States heard talkers from the Midland, Northern, Southern, and New England regions in two regional dialect perception tasks: identification and discrimination. The results showed that listeners as young as 4–5 years old understand the identity-marking significance of some regional dialects, although adult-like performance was not achieved until adolescence. Further, the findings suggest that regional dialect perception is simultaneously impacted by the specific dialects involved and the cognitive difficulty of the task.

Mapping Southern American English, 1861-1865

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Ellis
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Regional Differences ◽  
American English ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Past Participle ◽  
Regional Dialects ◽  
Regional Features ◽  
Individual Letter ◽  
Southern American English

Since April 2015 is the sesquicentennial of the end of the Civil War, now is a particularly appropriate time to review the progress of the Corpus of American Civil War Letters (CACWL) project and to suggest directions it might go in the future. Since 2007, we have located and collected images of nearly 11,000 letters and transcribed over 9,000 of these, totaling well over four million words. Of the transcribed letters, just over 6,000 were written by southerners (490 individual letter writers), a corpus extensive enough to begin identifying and describing what features were distinctively Southern in 19th-century American English. We have already mapped many of these features that are especially common in southern letters, for example, fixing to, howdy, past tense/past participle hope ‘helped’, qualifier tolerable, intensifier mighty, pronoun hit, and the noun heap. By way of comparison, we also have a somewhat smaller but rapidly growing collection of 3,000 transcribed letters written by individuals from northern states, and variant features from these letters are also being mapped. The work at present is very preliminary; there are thousands of additional letters to be collected and transcribed, particularly from northern states and from states west of the Mississippi. However, by mapping variants from letters that have already been transcribed, we can begin to get a better understanding of regional differences, as well as how regional features spread westward in the decades before the Civil War. We can also begin to obtain some sense of how American English in general, and particularly its regional dialects, may have changed since the mid 19th century. This article presents a preview of a number of those findings.

scholarly journals Applying adaptive recognition of the learner’s vowel space to English pronunciation training of native speakers of Japanese

2021 ◽  
Vol 102 ◽  
pp. 01004
Author(s):  
William L. Martens ◽  
Rui Wang
Keyword(s):  
Language Learning ◽  
Vocal Tract ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
American English ◽  
Computer Assisted ◽  
Computer Assisted Language Learning ◽  
Vowel Space ◽  
English Vowels ◽  
Japanese Learners ◽  
Adaptive Recognition

When native speakers of Japanese are taught English as a second language, there are difficulties with their training in pronunciation of American English vowels that can be ameliorated though adaptive recognition of the learner’s vowel space. This paper reports on the development of an online Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) environment that provides Japanese learners with customized target utterances of 12 single-syllable words that are synthesized according to an adaptive recognition of the learner’s vowel space. These customized target utterances provide each learner with examples of each of 12 American English monophthongs in consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) context in order to sound as if they had been uttered by the learners themselves. This adaptive process was incorporated into a successfully developed tool for Computer-Assisted Pronunciation Training (CAPT) which gave more appropriate pronunciation targets to each learner, rather than forcing the learners to attempt to match the formant frequencies of their own utterances to those of the target utterances as produced by a speaker exhibiting a different vowel space (i.e., a speaker with a different vocal tract length).

Articulatory Phonetics

2019 ◽  
pp. 285-301
Author(s):  
Sofia Alexandrovna Ivanova ◽  
Victoria Hasko
Keyword(s):  
English Language Learners ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
English Language ◽  
American English ◽  
Vowel Reduction ◽  
Regional Dialects ◽  
English Vowels ◽  
Articulatory Phonetics

This chapter focuses on the articulatory phonetics of English vowels; thus, it identifies descriptive parameters for vowel articulation in English, differentiates monophthongs and diphthongs, classifies the vowels of American English using these parameters, and addresses vowel reduction in American English. The theoretical material is followed by a pedagogical consideration of how the specifics of the articulatory characteristics of English vowels can be addressed in the classroom to facilitate comprehension and production of English vowels by English language learners. Supplementary materials are suggested for readers offering sample activities that could be used by language practitioners in ESL classrooms for this goal, as well as for exploring other dialects of English, including specific regional dialects falling under the umbrella of General American English, the variety addressed in this chapter.

Vowel Production in Winnipeg

2006 ◽  
Vol 51 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 127-141 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Hagiwara
Keyword(s):  
Acoustic Analysis ◽  
American English ◽  
Similar Data ◽  
Low Back ◽  
Canadian English ◽  
Vowel Production ◽  
Acoustic Study ◽  
Vowel Space ◽  
Precise Characterization

AbstractGeneral properties of the Canadian English vowel space are derived from an experimental-acoustic study of vowel production underway in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Comparing the preliminary Winnipeg results with similar data from General American English confirms previously described generalizations for Canadian English: the merger of low-back vowels, the relative retraction of /æ/, and the relative advancement of /u/ and /Ʊ/. However, a similar comparison of the Winnipeg sample with comparable Southern California data disputes the accuracy of the claim that Canadian Shift (Clarke et al. 1995) is a feature of ‘general’ Canadian and Californian English. An acoustic analysis uncovers subtle phonetic distinctions that make possible a more precise characterization of Canadian Raising: rather than only adjusting the height of the nucleus, Winnipeg speakers produce a directional shift in both the nucleus and offglide of the diphthongs /aɪ, aƱ/; this process applies to all three diphthongs (including /oɪ/).

Effects of Exposure and Vowel Space Distribution on Phonetic Drift: Evidence from American English Learners of French

2017 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Lang ◽  
Lisa Davidson
Keyword(s):  
Study Abroad ◽  
English Learners ◽  
American English ◽  
Space Distribution ◽  
L2 Acquisition ◽  
Vowel Space ◽  
High Vowels ◽  
Study Abroad Program ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Vowel Categories

Recent work by Chang has shown that even at the very earliest stages of second language (L2) acquisition, the phonetic implementation of speakers’ native English phoneme categories is slightly modified by contact with L2 Korean, which is referred to as “phonetic drift.” This study investigates whether rapid phonetic drift generalizes to another pairing of languages. We examined naïve American English learners of French, who were recorded producing both American English and French vowels after one and six weeks of a study abroad program in Paris. In addition, the Study Abroad group is compared with proficient American English L1 speakers of French who have been residents of Paris for at least five years, to investigate the impact of long-term use of an L2 on the vowel categories of L1. Whereas the Study Abroad group showed no evidence of phonetic drift after six weeks, the Paris Residents’ American English vowel space shifted along F1 and several English vowels demonstrated clear movement toward French monolingual norms. A closer look at the high vowels provides insight into how phonetic categories are influenced both by drift and by a pressure to keep vowel categories distinct between the languages. The results are also discussed with respect to potential effects of the size of the vowel inventory and the amount of input required to cause phonetic drift.

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