General Research Program

Keywords: Language variation and change; Sociophonetics; Language attitudes; Experimental phonetics; Laboratory phonology; Corpus design and creation

Exploring dialectal trait production in Québécois popular music

This project focuses on detailing and describing for the patterning of phonetic dialectal traits of Québécois singers. For the purposes of this study, I developed a novel corpus of 34 Québécois singers who released a total of 132 albums (1,417 songs) between 2002 and 2021. Thus far, the following phenomena have been explored in this corpus:

• High-vowel laxing in closed final syllables
• Diphthongization
• Affrication
• The role of singers’ musical genre
• Change according to year of album release
• Change across careers

Future directions for this project include:

• Probe the role of song topic (e.g. love songs vs. songs with a political message)
• Nasal vowels
• Explore the impact of singer contact with out-of-dialect markets
• Compare dialectal trait production in speech to music

Language attitudes as a predictor of style shifting and language change: Tracking the reversal of the Northern Cities Shift in Michigan English

This project, which is included as part of my dissertation, examines the extent to which language attitudes modulate speakers’ perception of phonological categories as well as their productions of them. That is, how do speakers’ beliefs about language and linguistic variants influence what they say in different social contexts and how do they influence how they expect others to speak?

To address this broader question, I examine the ongoing reversal of the Northern Cities Shift in Michigan English, where some of the vowels that comprise the shift are now socially evaluated.

Having analyzed perceptual attitudes, categorical perception, and production data from the same participants (n=42), my results suggest that:

1. Language attitudes alone are not sufficient to trigger chain shift reversal
2. Speakers can draw from their own language attitudes to determine how they speak in different stylistic contexts
3. The directionality of style shifting does not necessarily indicate the direction of language change
4. Changes in production appear to precede changes in perception when speakers rely on top-down processing as opposed to bottom-up processing
5. Listeners’ language attitudes inform speakers as to the phonological system of their interlocutors, influencing the representations that they access in speech perception

Rhotic variation in Hatian Creole: in collaboration with David Tézil (University of Alabama – dtezil@ua.edu)

This project seeks to add to our understanding of variation and change as it occurs in creoles as well as phonological representations in creoles. Tézil’s (2019) thesis is the first large-scale variationist study on creole. Together, we are using the corpus he created of Haitian Creole speech to further explore the issues of rhotic variation in this creole. Thus far, we have found that rural speakers tend to produce /r/ as [w] more frequently than urban speakers do in monitored speech and that there is no effect of gender. We are continuing to code the monitored speech data, with the help of the two research assistants that I trained and manage. We additionally found that bilingualism does not predict frequency of [w] for /r/.

We are currently working on a style-shifting analysis of /r/ variation using the same data set and speakers.

Investigating the link between intelligibility and attitudes in cross-dialectal speech perception

This project further tests the relationship between intelligiblity and attitudes with two varieties of French: Laurentian French and Hexagonal French. For these dialects, our data show that intelligibility and attitudes are not closely linked, however, attitudes and comprehensibilty (perceptions of speaker intelligbility) are linked. This project was developed under the supervision of Prof. Monica Nesbitt and Prof. Jeff Lamontagne.

I am currently refining a follow-up study that investigates how differences in cross-dialectal phonological processes influence intelligibility and language attitudes.