Phonetic convergence to Southern American English: Acoustics and perception

2020 ◽  
Vol 147 (1) ◽  
pp. 671-683
Author(s):  
Cynthia G. Clopper ◽  
Ellen Dossey
Keyword(s):  
American English ◽  
Phonetic Convergence ◽  
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.

scholarly journals Phonetic convergence towards American English by Indian agents in international service encounters

2017 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 244-274
Author(s):  
Claire Cowie ◽  
Anna Pande
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Social Factors ◽  
American English ◽  
Service Encounters ◽  
International Service ◽  
Call Centres ◽  
Phonetic Convergence ◽  
It Workers ◽  
Indian Agents

Abstract In outsourced voice-based services (call centres are a typical example), an agent providing a service is likely to accommodate their speech to that of the customer. In services outsourced to India, as in other postcolonial settings, the customer accent typically does not have a place in that agent’s repertoire. This presents an opportunity to test whether exposure to the customer accent through telephone work promotes phonetic convergence, and/or whether social factors are implicated in convergence. In this map task experiment, 16 IT workers from Pune (half of whom regularly spoke to American colleagues on the telephone) gave directions to American followers. There was evidence of imitation of the bath vowel with an American addressee. However, imitation did not depend on exposure alone. Attitudes to American English, social networks and individuals’ sense of themselves as performers affected their behaviour in the experiment.

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

scholarly journals Nonconvergence and Divergence in Bilingual Phonological and Phonetic Systems: Low Back Vowels in Moundridge Schweitzer German and English

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 304-323
Author(s):  
Hyoun-A Joo ◽  
Lara Schwarz ◽  
B. Richard Page
Keyword(s):  
American English ◽  
Low Back ◽  
Heritage Speakers ◽  
Phonetic Convergence

This study explores the bilingual phonology of two heritage speakers of Moundridge Schweitzer German (msg) from Moundridge, Kansas. The speakers are descendants of Mennonite speakers of German who settled in the area around Moundridge, Kansas, in the 1870s. The production of Moundridge Schweitzer German /a/ and /ɔ/ and American English /a/ and /ɔ/ were compared and no evidence of phonological or phonetic convergence was found. For one speaker, there was evidence that phonetic realizations of /a/ and /ɔ/ in the two languages were diverging with a merger or a near merger of the two vowels in the heritage variety of German but not in English.

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
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