An acoustic and phonological description of /z/-devoicing in Southern American English

2017 ◽  
Vol 142 (4) ◽  
pp. 2678-2678 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abby Walker ◽  
Amy Southall ◽  
Rachel Hargrave
Keyword(s):  
American English ◽  
Southern American English

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.

The effects of dialect variation on speech intelligibility in a multitalker background

2014 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 729-746 ◽  
Author(s):  
EWA JACEWICZ ◽  
ROBERT ALLEN FOX
Keyword(s):  
Speech Intelligibility ◽  
American English ◽  
Noise Levels ◽  
Dialect Variation ◽  
Southern American English ◽  
Babble Noise ◽  
Phonetic Features

ABSTRACTSpeech intelligibility in a multitalker background can be affected by the language of both the talker and the interfering speech. This study investigated whether this interaction is modulated by dialect variations of the same language. American English listeners were presented with target sentences in either their own General American English (GAE) or a different accent (Southern American English [SAE]) masked by either GAE or SAE two-talker babble at three sound to noise ratios (SNRs): +3, 0, and –3 dB. All speech materials were produced by male talkers. Across all conditions, SAE target was more intelligible than GAE. Intelligibility of either target decreased as the level of the interfering babble noise increased. Target accent interacted with masking accent: at +3 dB SNR, GAE (and not SAE) was the more effective masker. The target-masker interaction was different as listening conditions deteriorated: at 0 and –3 dB SNR, masking accent did not affect GAE target, but when the target was SAE, the SAE masker (and not GAE) was more effective. Thus, at increased noise levels, listeners benefited from the mismatch between the target and masking accents only when the target was in a nonnative accent. These results demonstrate that dialect variation can influence listeners’ performance in a multitalker environment. The apparent asymmetry in intelligibility of accents may be in part related to dialect-specific prosodic and phonetic features.

The Persistence of Southern American English

1996 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 308-321 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guy Bailey ◽  
Jan Tillery
Keyword(s):  
American English ◽  
Southern American English

Annotated Bibliography of Southern American English

Language ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
pp. 188
Author(s):  
Glenn G. Gilbert ◽  
James B. McMillan ◽  
Michael B. Montgomery
Keyword(s):  
American English ◽  
Annotated Bibliography ◽  
Southern American English

scholarly journals Binding as Co-indexing vs. Binding as Movement: Evidence from Personal Datives

2013 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 45
Author(s):  
Youssef A. Haddad
Keyword(s):  
American English ◽  
Binding Theory ◽  
Syntactic Theory ◽  
Southern American English ◽  
Lebanese Arabic ◽  
Condition B

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt:Personal dative constructions (PDCs) are problematic from a syntactic perspective because they seem to violate Condition B of Binding Theory without leading to ungrammaticality. Condition B states that a pronoun should be locally free. Therefore, by allowing a pronoun to be coreferential with a local c-commanding antecedent, PDCs are expected to induce a violation, but they don’t. How can syntactic theory account for these facts in a principled way? I explore two approaches, focusing on Southern American English and Lebanese Arabic, both of which indicate that PDCs fall outside the constraints of Binding Theory, which explains why their realization as free pronouns does not lead to ungrammaticality.

Acquisition and Acoustic Patterns of Southern American English /l/ in Young Children

2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (8) ◽  
pp. 2609-2624
Author(s):  
Hyunju Chung
Keyword(s):  
American English ◽  
Careful Consideration ◽  
Individual Variability ◽  
Low Back ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Apparent Effect ◽  
Developmental Patterns ◽  
Language Background ◽  
Word Position ◽  
Southern American English

Purpose The aim of the current study was to examine /l/ developmental patterns in young learners of Southern American English, especially in relation to the effect of word position and phonetic contexts. Method Eighteen children with typically developing speech, aged between 2 and 5 years, produced monosyllabic single words containing singleton /l/ in different word positions (pre- vs. postvocalic /l/) across different vowel contexts (high front vs. low back) and cluster /l/ in different consonant contexts (/pl, bl/ vs. /kl, gl/). Each production was analyzed for its accuracy and acoustic patterns as measured by the first two formant frequencies and their difference (F1, F2, and F2-F1). Results There was great individual variability in /l/ acquisition patterns, with some 2- and 3-year-olds reaching 100% accuracy for prevocalic /l/, while others were below 70%. Overall, accuracy of prevocalic /l/ was higher than that of postvocalic /l/. Acoustic patterns of pre- and postvocalic /l/ showed greater differences in younger children and less apparent differences in 5-year-olds. There were no statistically significant differences between the acoustic patterns of /l/ coded as perceptually acceptable and those coded as misarticulated. There was also no apparent effect of vowel and consonant contexts on /l/ patterns. Conclusion The accuracy patterns of this study suggest an earlier development of /l/, especially prevocalic /l/, than has been reported in previous studies. The differences in acoustic patterns between pre- and postvocalic /l/, which become less apparent with age, may suggest that children alter the way they articulate /l/ with age. No significant acoustic differences between acceptable and misarticulated /l/, especially postvocalic /l/, suggest a gradient nature of /l/ that is dialect specific. This suggests the need for careful consideration of a child's dialect/language background when studying /l/.

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