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Acoustics of Regionally Accented Speech
Sociocultural variation in pronunciation is a fast-developing, captivating area of acoustic research as regional accents continue to diversify Ameri- can speech.
Introduction
Speech communication typically takes place in a social context. Naturally, spoken language transmits not only a message but also indexical variation cueing social attributes of the speakers, such as their age, sex, socioeconomic status, education, or occupation. Variation of this kind reflects social aspects of language use within conventions imposed by both the individual and society.
Email:
jacewicz.1@osu.edu
Robert A. Fox
Postal:
Department of Speech and Hearing Science The Ohio State University 1070 Carmack Road Columbus, Ohio 43210-1002 USA
Email:
fox.2@osu.edu
Ewa Jacewicz
Postal:
Department of Speech and Hearing Science The Ohio State University 1070 Carmack Road Columbus, Ohio 43210-1002 USA
But language use is also sensitive to more general cultural factors such as beliefs, attitudes, behaviors, customs, and values of a given group that are transmitted from one generation to the next. Indeed, cultural history has played an important role in the development of regional variation in English spoken in North America. The geographic patterns of early immigration from England were largely shaped in the 18th and 19th centuries as settlers constructed transportation systems facilitat- ing the spread of their original English dialects westward. Settlement patterns had important linguistic consequences for the formation of American cultural geog- raphy and regional variation in American English (AE) and, to some extent, still exert a persistent influence on modern speech.
Traditionally, the development of AE dialects in the United States has been studied within the field of sociolinguistics, a branch of linguistics concerned with how language use is influenced by society. More focused work on regional dialects has been carried out within the subfield of dialectology. In seeking to determine fea- tures of regional dialects and understand their sociocultural context, both socio- linguists and dialect geographers examine speech samples and classify markers of differences in the lexicon (vocabulary), grammar, usage, and phonology (pronun- ciation). Phonological variants are fairly salient markers and, typically, have been identified by means of auditory (“by ear”) judgments and described qualitatively. For example, the salience of the r-less speech feature of eastern New England asso- ciated with the Bostonian accent has often been captured orthographically (“Pahk the cah in Hahvahd yahd” for “Park the car in Harvard yard”) or transcribed using phonetic symbols. But traditional descriptions tend to fail when faced with mod- ern speech recognition applications (listen how to Siri deals with the Bostonian accent at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wBpSWxPo6o).
This is where acoustic analysis of regionally accented speech has emerged as a wel- come area of scientific inquiry. With the technological advancement over the last two decades and development of new analytic tools and methodologies, regional variation has been explored with a great deal of scientific rigor, producing new evidence and advancing the field of speech communication.
Here, we present a few key concepts and selected highlights from this rapidly developing area in speech acoustics. We focus here on AE because most of the
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