Vowel density differences among regional dialects of American English.

2011 ◽  
Vol 129 (4) ◽  
pp. 2452-2452
Author(s):  
Robert A. Fox ◽  
Ewa Jacewicz
2017 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth A. McCullough ◽  
Cynthia G. Clopper ◽  
Laura Wagner

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.


2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Ellis

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.


Author(s):  
Sofia Alexandrovna Ivanova ◽  
Victoria Hasko

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.


2007 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 421-438 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cynthia G. Clopper ◽  
David B. Pisoni

2006 ◽  
Vol 120 (5) ◽  
pp. 3294-3294 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ewa Jacewicz ◽  
Robert Allen Fox ◽  
Yolanda Holt ◽  
Joseph Salmons

Author(s):  
Iryna Nickolayeva

The article shows the establishment of the territorial norms on the level of phonetics in the American English. It analyses their national and cultural peculiarities. The studied and presented material shows that the phonetic characteristics of the American national version of the English language have their own territorial national and cultural characteristics. The article deals with the issue of phonetic peculiarities of the dialectic language as an ideal of the signs of the territorial jurisdiction of native speakers in terms of interpersonal communication. The main causes of regional dialects are analyzed. Separately, it is noted that the phonetic characteristics of the American national version of English in the South-West of the United States have their own regional identity. It is underlined that distinctive phonetic features of the English language in the United States include not only dialect phenomena, but they are also characteristic of the literary language. The assessment of the same linguistic facts from the point of view of American and British norms is indicative in this respect. In this article, it is discussed in detail the phonetic features of American English compared to British, officially recognized in the world community the main. The American version is of the greatest interest in comparison with Canadian, Australian and New Zealand English, because, for various reasons, it has undergone a large number of changes in all aspects of the language, including phonetic. The article emphasizes that the United States is developing its own territorial phonetic norms.


2006 ◽  
Vol 119 (1) ◽  
pp. 566-574 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cynthia G. Clopper ◽  
Susannah V. Levi ◽  
David B. Pisoni

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