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Journal articles on the topic 'Vowel shifts'
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D'Onofrio, Annette, Teresa Pratt, and Janneke Van Hofwegen. "Compression in the California Vowel Shift: Tracking generational sound change in California's Central Valley." Language Variation and Change 31, no. 2 (June 6, 2019): 193–217. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0954394519000085.
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ABSTRACTThis paper investigates the California Vowel Shift, previously characterized as a chain shift, in communities across California's Central Valley. An incremental apparent time analysis of 72 Californians’ vowel spaces provides no clear evidence of a gradual chain shift; that is, changes have not unfolded in an order that reflects an implicational chain in chronological time. Instead, we see contemporaneous movements of vowels that work against the phonological tendency of maximal dispersion typically invoked in describing chain shifts. By analyzing change in the size and dispersion of the entire vowel space, we find that ongoing sound change is instead characterized by a holistic compression of the vowel space. This suggests that, in these California communities, the shift's unfolding was driven by articulatory and social, rather than purely phonological, factors. We propose that the analysis of the size and spread of holistic vowel space can help characterize the nature and motivations for vocalic changes.
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Burgos, Pepi, Roeland van Hout, and Brigitte Planken. "Matching Acoustical Properties and Native Perceptual Assessments of L2 Speech." Open Linguistics 4, no. 1 (January 1, 2018): 199–226. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/opli-2018-0011.
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AbstractThis article analyses the acoustical properties of Dutch vowels produced by adult Spanish learners and investigates how these vowels are perceived by non-expert native Dutch listeners. Statistical vowel classifications obtained from the acoustical properties of the learner vowel realizations were compared to vowel classifications provided by native Dutch listeners. Both types of classifications were affected by the specific set of vowels included as stimuli, an effect caused by the large variability in Spanish learners’ vowel realizations. While there were matches between the two types of classifications, shifts were noted within and between production and perception, depending on the vowel and vowel features. We considered the variability between Spanish learners further by investigating individual patterns in the production and perception data, and linking these to the learners’ proficiency level and multilingual background. We conclude that integrating production and perception data provides valuable insights into the role of different features in adult L2 learning, and how their properties actively interact in the way L2 speech is perceived. A second conclusion is that adaptive mechanisms, signalled by boundary shifts and useful in coping with variability of non-native vowel stimuli, play a role in both statistical vowel classifications (production) and human vowel recognition (perception).
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Burns, Roslyn. "The Plautdietsch Vowel Shift Across Space and Time." Journal of Linguistic Geography 3, no. 2 (September 2015): 72–94. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/jlg.2016.3.
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This paper provides an account of the long vowel shift currently underway in the trans-statal Plautdietsch speech community. Placement of the shift within Labov’s typology of vowel shifts reveals a commonly overlooked development in Plautdietsch vowel movement, namely the centralization of mid-high back vowels which must have occurred before the breakup of the community into New and Old World groups. Shared centralization prompted both groups to have similar developments in the back vowel space after they were no longer geographically contiguous and prompted many groups to undergo centralization in the front vowel space. This case study reveals a pattern of innovation in which separation from parent communities fosters linguistic innovations in daughter communities. These innovations occur irrespective of the traditional Molotschna or Chortitza dialect affiliation of the daughter colonies in question.
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Tse, Holman. "Vowel shifts in Cantonese?" Regional Chinese in Contact 5, no. 1 (June 13, 2019): 67–83. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/aplv.19001.tse.
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Abstract This paper addresses Labov’s principles of vowel chain shifting in Toronto and Hong Kong Cantonese based on sociolinguistic interviews from the Heritage Language Variation and Change in Toronto Project. The analysis is based on normalized F1 and F2 values of 33,179 vowel tokens from 11 monophthongs produced by 32 speakers (8 from Hong Kong, 24 from Toronto). In Toronto, results show retraction of [y] by generation but fronting of [i] by age. In Hong Kong, age is a significant predictor for the lowering of [ɪ], [ʊ], [ɔ], and for the fronting of [ɔ] and [i]. Overall, there is more vowel shifting in Hong Kong than in Toronto and the shifting is consistent with Labov’s Principles.
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Al Mahmoud, Mahmoud. "ACOUSTIC EFFECTS OF DURATIONAL CUES IN THE PERCEPTION OF NAJDI ARABIC VOWEL CONTINUA." Language Literacy: Journal of Linguistics, Literature, and Language Teaching 5, no. 1 (June 27, 2021): 57–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.30743/ll.v5i1.3591.
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This paper explores how the manipulation of vowel duration as a perceptual cue influences listeners’ perceptual ability. Four native speakers of Najdi Arabic, a well-known variety of Arabic in the Arabian Peninsula, were tested on the perception of /a/ vs. /ɛ/ vowels. Listeners’ identification and discrimination rates along each vowel continuum showed a clear effect of duration on the perception of /a/-/ɛ/ contrast. In each vowel continuum, listeners were more inclined to classify stimuli as belonging to one vowel or the other based on relative proximity to the steady-state vowel duration. Perceptibility naturally improved as duration approximated the normal duration of either vowel. Listeners’ perceptual judgments in the identification and discrimination of the vowels were swayed by their aural sensitivity to perceptual shifts (/a/-/ɛ/ at 185-195ms; /ɛ/-/a/ at 195-205ms). Moreover, findings of the identification task followed predictably from the discrimination task; this could be taken as evidence for the existence of categorical perception. Results aggregately indicate that perception of the two Najdi Arabic vowels proceeded as a function of duration.
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Boberg, Charles. "A Closer Look at the Short Front Vowel Shift in Canada." Journal of English Linguistics 47, no. 2 (March 24, 2019): 91–119. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0075424219831353.
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This paper examines several aspects of the “Short Front Vowel Shift” (SFVS) in Canadian English, known in most previous research as the “Canadian Vowel Shift.” It is based on acoustic analysis of a list of one hundred words produced by sixty-one Canadian and thirty-one American university students. The analysis focuses on three questions: (1) the relations among the vowels involved in the shift, including relations with vowels not traditionally considered part of the shift; (2) the behavior of individual words in each vowel category, which displays allophonic variation; and (3) the role of regional and national identity (western versus eastern Canadian, and Canadian versus American) and speaker sex in predicting the degree of participation in the shift, which is measured with a unitary quantitative index of the shift that is proposed here for the first time. The analysis finds that the short front vowels (kit, dress, and trap) lower and retract as a set, but that shifts of several back vowels (particularly foot, goat, and strut) are also correlated but not necessarily structurally connected with these; that following voiceless fricatives favor the SFVS while preceding velars disfavor it; that women are more advanced in the shift than men; that there is no regional difference within Canada in the progress of the shift; and, most surprisingly, that, once the American comparison group is restricted to those with a low-back merger, Americans are more shifted than their Canadian peers, calling into question the association of the shift with Canada in most previous research on Canadian English.
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Ohala, John J., Patrice Speeter Beddor, Rena Arens Krakow, and Louis M. Goldstein. "Perceptual constraints and phonological change: a study of nasal vowel height." Phonology Yearbook 3 (May 1986): 197–217. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0952675700000646.
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ABSTRACTTo address the claim that listener misperceptions are a source of phonological shifts in nasal vowel height, the phonological, acoustic and perceptual effects of nasalisation on vowel height were examined. We show that the acoustic consequences of nasal coupling, while consistent with phonological patterns of nasal vowel raising and lowering, do not always influence perceived vowel height. The perceptual data suggest that nasalisation affects perceived vowel height only when nasalisation is phonetically inappropriate (e.g. insufficient or excessive nasal coupling) or phonologically inappropriate (e.g. no conditioning environment in a language without distinctive nasal vowels). It is argued that these conditions, rather than the inherent inability of the listener to distinguish the spectral effects of velic and tongue body gestures, lead to perceptual misinterpretations and potentially to sound change.
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Becker, Michael, and Peter Jurgec. "Positional faithfulness drives laxness alternations in Slovenian." Phonology 37, no. 3 (August 2020): 335–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0952675720000160.
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We analyse the distribution of vowel laxness and stress alternations in Slovenian nouns (for example in the nominative and genitive forms of the masculine noun [ˈjɛzik ~ jeˈzika] ‘tongue’), showing that stress shifts away from mid lax vowels in initial syllables. A stress shift of this sort is predicted by positional faithfulness (Beckman 1997). We show that this prediction is correct, contra McCarthy (2007, 2010) and Jesney (2011). The productivity of the pattern is confirmed in a large-scale nonce-word task. Stress shift in Slovenian is a result of the markedness of mid lax vowels and, perhaps counterintuitively, faithfulness to laxness in initial stressed position.
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Šimáčková, Šárka, and Václav Jonáš Podlipský. "Production Accuracy of L2 Vowels: Phonological Parsimony and Phonetic Flexibility." Research in Language 16, no. 2 (June 30, 2018): 169–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/rela-2018-0009.
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Ultimate attainment in foreign-language sound learning is addressed via vowel production accuracy in English spoken by advanced Czech EFL learners. English FLEECE–KIT, DRESS–TRAP, and GOOSE–FOOT contrasts are examined in terms of length, height, and backness. Our data show that, while being constrained by phonemic category assimilation (new vowel height distinctions are not created), the learners’ interlanguage combines phonological parsimony (reusing L1 length feature to contrast L2 vowels) with phonetic flexibility (within-category shifts reflecting L1–L2 phonetic dissimilarity). Although achieving nativelike phonological competence may not be possible learners who acquire L2 in the prevailingly L1 environment, the Czech learners’ implementations of English vowels revealed their ability to adjust for phonetic detail of L2 sounds.
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Fabricius, Anne. "Using angle calculations to demonstrate vowel shifts." Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 40, no. 1 (January 2008): 7–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03740463.2007.10414616.
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Johnston, Paul A. "English Vowel Shifting." Diachronica 9, no. 2 (January 1, 1992): 189–226. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/dia.9.2.03joh.
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SUMMARY The English Great Vowel Shift (GVS) is often described as a seamless chain shift, where each height of vowel, in moving, impinges on or is pulled by the vowel above it. This scenario is supported by orthoëpic evidence dealing with the Standard and can capture the shift of most Southern and Midland localized varieties also. When dealing with more northerly varieties, or Southern ones with a gap in the system, the notion of a seamless chain breaks down; there are plainly shifts in the North Midlands where a low-mid vowel did not raise to a high-mid one, breaking the chain, and shifts in dialects where high-mid monophthongs did not exist. Postulating that the movement of the top two heights and the bottom two were independent in origin can explain all types of GVS shifts, and is supported by evidence from medieval spellings, which imply that the two chains started in different places (the top half in the Northwest Midlands and the Southwest, the bottom in the Plain of York); and by Yorkshire dialect evidence, which implies an opposite relative ordering of the two chains with respect to each other to elsewhere. Each of the 'small vowel shifts', which are assumed to have intertwined during their spread in many dialects, can be related to sound change processes occurring in other periods, making the GVS less typologically odd, and opening up arguments by analogy with modern processes as possible explanations for its occurrence. RÉSUMÉ On décrit souvent le grand changement des voyelles (GVS) en anglais comme changement régulier en chaîne, où chaque niveau de voyelle, en se déplaçant, se heurte à ou est tiré par la voyelle supérieure. Ce point de vue se fonde sur des témoignages orthoépiques pris à l'anglais cultivé, et peut expliquer aussi le changement de la plupart des variétés localisées au Sud et au Centre. Mais quand on opère avec un plus grand nombre de variétés du Nord, ou du Sud, comportant une rupture dans le système, la notion de chaine régulière s'effondre; on voit nettement des changements se produire en bordure septentrionale du Centre où une voyelle mi-basse ne s'est pas élevée à une voyelle mi-haute, cassant ainsi la chaîne; il n'y eut pas de changements dans des dialectes où des monothongues de hauteur moyenne. Si l'on postule que le mouvement des deux niveaux les plus hauts et celui des deux niveaux les plus bas étaient originellement indépendants, on peut expliquer toutes sortes de changements GVS. Cette idée est étayée par des témoignages orthographiques médiévaux, qui suggèrent que les deux chaines ont commencé en des endroits différents (moitié supérieure de la région septentrionale du Centre et du Sud-Ouest, moitié inférieure dans la plaine de York); et par des indications données par le dialecte de Yorkshire, qui suggèrent un ordre relatif des deux chaines opposé à ce qu'on voit ailleurs. Tous les 'petits changements de voyelles' qui se sont probablement entrelacés au cour de leur diffusion dans de nombreux dialectes peuvent être mis en rapport avec des changements phonétiques qui eurent lieu pendant d'autres périodes. Une telle relation rendrait les changements GVS typologiquement moins étranges; elle trouverait des parallèles dans des processus modernes susceptibles d'en expliquer l'existence. ZUSAMMENFASSUNG Die GroBe Englische Vokalverschiebung (GVS) wird oft als eine nahtlose Kette beschrieben, wobei jede Vokalhöhe, wenn sie in Bewegung gerät, Druck auf die jeweils höhere ausübt oder ein Vokal von dem jeweils höheren Vokal angezogen wird. Ein solcher Vorgang wird durch orthoëpische Evidenz unter-stiitzt, die mit der Standardspraehe zu tun hat, und es kann auch die Verschie-bung der meisten örtlichen Varietâten in den südenglisehen Gebieten und den Midlands abdecken. Wenn man jedoch die weiter nordlichen Mundarten be-trachtet oder siidliche, die eine Liïcke im System aufweisen, bricht die Vor-stellung einer nahtlosen Kette zusammen; es gibt einfach Verschiebungen in den nordlichen Midlands, in denen ein mittler-niederer Vokal nicht zu einem mittleren-hohen gehoben wurde. Auf dièse Weise wird also die Kette durch-brochen; Lautverschiebungen treten in Dialekten auf, in denen es keine mittlerenhohen Monophthonge gibt. Wenn man dagegen postuliert, daB die Bewegung der beiden oberen hohen und der beiden unteren tiefen Vokalreihen ursprlinglich unabhàngig voneinander vor sich ging, kann man alle Typen der GVS erklâren. Eine solche Analyse wird in der Tat durch Evidenz mittel-alterlicher Orthographie unterstiitzt, die nahelegt, daB zwei Ketten an verschie-denen Stellen ihren Anfang hatten, nämlich die 'obere Hälfte' in den nord-westlichen Midlands und im Sudwesten, die 'untere Hälfte' in der Tiefebene von York. Dazu kommt auBerdem, daß die Yorkshire-Dialekte eine kontrâre relative Anordnung der beiden (Teil-)Ketten nahelegen würde. Eine jede dieser beiden 'Kleinen Vokal verschiebungen', von denen hier angenommen wird, daB sie wâhrend ihrer Ausbreitung in verschiedenen Mundarten miteinander verflochten wurden, kann mit Lautwandelprozessen verbunden werden, die in anderen Perioden auftreten, so daB die GVS typologisch weniger eigenartig erscheint. Auf diese Weise wird die Diskussion frei fiir analoge Prozesse in modemen Varietäten des Englischen als mögliche Erklärung ihres Auftretens.
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Schadeberg, Thilo C. "Spirantization and the 7-to-5 Vowel Merger in Bantu." Sound Change 9 (January 1, 1994): 73–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/bjl.9.06sch.
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Abstract. Many Bantu languages have the balanced seven-vowel system i i e a c u u. It is the system that one would, on internal evidence, reconstruct for proto-Bantu. Many other Bantu languages have a reduced five-vowel system i e a c u. The five-vowel systems are historically almost always the result of a merger of the two highest front and back vowels, respectively; i.e., the result of a merger of *i /*i and of *u/*u ("7>5"). Another widespread sound change occurring in Bantu is the one here called "Spirantization". It occurs in seven-vowel languages and affects obstruents in the environment preceding the high vowels i and u (not i and v). It typically creates strident fricatives (s, f...) not formerly present in the system. Some remarkable observations can be made concerning the historical co-occurrence of the two sound shifts. Spirantization and 7>5: (i) No language has undergone 7>5 but not Spirantization; (ii) Only few languages have undergone Spirantization but not 7>5. (iii) In languages which have undergone both sound shifts, Spirantization always preceded 7>5. In this contribution I try to "explain" these patterns of co-occurrence without appeal to structuralist chain analyses. I consider both changes as being independently well motivated, and while admitting the possibility that the phonological system as such may favour or disfavour certain changes I argue that areal norm and areal spread are the major reasons for the widespread combined occurrence of Spirantization and 7>5, in that (apparent) order.
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Higashikawa, Masahiko, and Fred D. Minifie. "Acoustical-Perceptual Correlates of "Whisper Pitch" in Synthetically Generated Vowels." Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 42, no. 3 (June 1999): 583–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.1044/jslhr.4203.583.
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The purpose of this investigation was to clarify acoustical-perceptual relationships in identification of "pitch" during whispered vowel production. The experimenters systematically varied selected acoustic features of synthetically generated "whispered" vowels to control which formant frequencies were shifted (F1, F2, or F1&F2), the direction of formant frequency shifts (up or down), and the magnitude of formant frequency shifts (20 Hz, 40 Hz, 60 Hz). Two sets of stimuli were produced to simulate the resonance characteristics of the vowel /a/: one set for male talkers and one for female talkers. Ninety-four pairs of synthesized vowel tokens were randomly presented to 17 listeners who judged if the "pitch" of the second member of the pair was the same, higher, or lower than the "pitch" of the first member. The results showed an inverse relationship between the magnitude of formant frequency changes presented to the judges and the number of perceptual mismatches in "whisper pitch." Also, fewer mismatches in the identification of whisper pitch occurred when both F1 and F2 were changed simultaneously than when either F1 or F2 was changed individually. No differences were found between the perceptual responses to "male" and "female" vowel simulations. The primary implication of this study is that whisper pitch is more influenced by simultaneous changes in F1 and F2 than by changes in only one of the formants.
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Schendl, Herbert, and Nikolaus Ritt. "Of vowel shifts great, small, long and short." Language Sciences 24, no. 3-4 (May 2002): 409–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/s0388-0001(01)00041-9.
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Glidden, Catherine M., Peter F. Assmann, and Terrance M. Nearey. "Effects of frequency shifts on vowel category judgments." Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 112, no. 5 (November 2002): 2249. http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/1.4778942.
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Nearey, Terrance M., and Peter F. Assmann. "Modeling the effects of frequency shifts on vowel identification." Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 121, no. 5 (May 2007): 3136. http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/1.4782163.
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Assmann, Peter F., Catherine M. Glidden, and Terrance M. Nearey. "Effects of context and frequency shifts in vowel identification." Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 116, no. 4 (October 2004): 2571. http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/1.4785268.
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Fridland, Valerie, Tyler Kendall, and Charlie Farrington. "The role of duration in regional U.S. vowel shifts." Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 133, no. 5 (May 2013): 3612. http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/1.4806732.
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Katseff, Shira, John F. Houde, and Keith Johnson. "Talkers compensate for feedback shifts within their vowel regions." Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 128, no. 4 (October 2010): 2287. http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/1.3508021.
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Jarosz, Aleksandra. "Reflexes of Proto-Ryukyuan *i and *u in Miyakoan as a chain shift." Lingua Posnaniensis 60, no. 2 (December 1, 2018): 99–121. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/linpo-2018-0014.
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Abstract The paper examines conditioned changes that occurred in Miyakoan (mostly Proto-Miyakoan) reflexes of Proto-Ryukyuan close vowels *i and *u after the unconditioned raising of Proto-Ryukyuan *e and *o had taken place. These changes in close vowels are interpreted here as chain shifts. The core assumption is that changes in *i and *u occurred in response to the raising of *e and *o in order to avoid or compensate for the functionally damaging merger of *i/*e and *u/*o. The paper shows that there is a rather wide range of conditions under which *i and *u produced distinct reflexes in Miyakoan. Consequently, these vowels acted differently after stops, after sibilants, after nasals, in an onsetless/standalone position, after the flap, before the flap, and before nasals and other sonorants word-initially. At the same time, reflexes of both proto-vowels have been observed to maintain certain symmetry, meaning that in a similar environment, *i and *u generally underwent similar or analogical changes. Thus, the conditions for identifying Miyakoan reflexes or *i and *u are listed and specified in this paper. Conversely, it is argued that unless one of these conditions has been met, one should reconstruct a Proto-Ryukyuan mid-vowel rather than a close vowel. Such specification may influence the comparative study of Ryukyuan languages to a significant degree, challenging a number of the so far established reconstructions (most notably Thorpe 1983).
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Fox, Joshua. "A Sequence of Vowel Shifts in Phoenician and Other Languages." Journal of Near Eastern Studies 55, no. 1 (January 1996): 37–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/373783.
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Nittrouer, Susan, and Marnie E. Miller. "Developmental weighting shifts for noise components of fricative-vowel syllables." Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 102, no. 1 (July 1997): 572–80. http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/1.419730.
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Dalola, Amanda, and Barbara E. Bullock. "ON SOCIOPHONETIC COMPETENCE." Studies in Second Language Acquisition 39, no. 4 (September 23, 2016): 769–99. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0272263116000309.
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The data from this study investigate phrase-final vowel devoicing in Metropolitan French among L1 and L2 speakers, in terms of number of times a speaker devoices a phrase-final high vowel and percentage of the vowel that is devoiced. The goal is to assess whether experienced L2 speakers use style-based variation in response to the same factors as native speakers. Results from a set of role playing and word list tasks revealed that L2 devoicing rates matched those of the natives, but were conditioned by different factors in each group. The duration of L2 speaker devoicing, however, was found not to match native levels. Notable differences emerged in response to shifts in style: L1 speakers showed higher rates and enhanced degrees of devoicing in pragmatic contexts that favored either slower or more formal speech, while L2 speakers responded very little to pragmatic shifts within role plays, instead responding more pronouncedly to different tasks.
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Fridland, Valerie. "Regional differences in perceiving vowel tokens on Southerness, education, and pleasantness ratings." Language Variation and Change 20, no. 1 (March 2008): 67–83. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0954394508000069.
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AbstractThis study investigates the role of regional dialect experience on the social awareness of synthesized vowel tokens to regional in-group and out-group members. For the study, speakers from Reno, NV, were given the same perception test used in a previous study in Memphis, TN. Comparing the Reno results to those found in Memphis, the study examines whether differences in regional vowel norms affect how Westerners rate Southern-shifted and non-Southern-shifted vowel variants on Southernness, education, and pleasantness scales. The study also looks at how Reno raters interpreted shifted back vowel variants, found productively in their local community, compared to front vowel shifts found exclusively in the South. Finally, the paper explores how the results suggest that regional dialect exposure attunes listeners to attend to different aspects of vowel quality than those outside the region. In examining how regional dialect experience affects listener recognition and evaluation of local and nonlocal vowel norms, the paper begins to explore how much the production/perception relationship is mediated by speakers' participation in locally constructed and defined speech communities.
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Sapienza, Christine M., Suzanne Walton, and Thomas Murry. "Acoustic Variations in Adductor Spasmodic Dysphonia as a Function of Speech Task." Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 42, no. 1 (February 1999): 127–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.1044/jslhr.4201.127.
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Acoustic phonatory events were identified in 14 women diagnosed with ADSD and compared to those of 14 women age-matched (±2 years) with no evidence of vocal pathology/dysfunction. The three acoustic parameters examined during sustained vowel production and reading included phonatory breaks, aperiodicity, and frequency shifts. Intra- and intermeasurer correlations showed high reliability for the measures. Findings indicated that those with ADSD produced a greater frequency of aberrant acoustic events than the controls during both tasks. For the group with ADSD, the amount and type of each event also varied with utterance type. The sustained vowel sample produced by those with ADSD consisted of a greater percentage of aperiodic segments followed by phonatory breaks and frequency shifts. During reading, frequency shifts were the predominant acoustic event, followed by phonatory breaks and aperiodicity. The advantage of segmenting the acoustic waveform into these measures and the relevancy of examining intertask performances by those with ADSD is discussed.
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Glidden, Catherine M., and Peter F. Assmann. "Effects of visual gender and frequency shifts on vowel category judgments." Acoustics Research Letters Online 5, no. 4 (October 2004): 132–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/1.1764472.
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Ingold, Suzey. "Goin’ Home: The Role of Vowel Raising in Indexing an Ethnic Identity." Lifespans and Styles 3, no. 1 (March 26, 2017): 20–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.2218/ls.v3i1.2017.1825.
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Vowel height can be seen as a feature indexing a particular ethnic identity or indicating a style shift between two such identities. This paper focuses on Bradford-born South Asian musician Zayn Malik, an interesting subject given his prominent status as one of the most influential Asians in Britain today (Parveen 2016). I consider the role of vowel raising in the GOAT lexical set (Wells 1982) over the period of 2010 to 2016 and in style-shifting between casual, interview, and performative styles. The results of my study indicate significant differences in F1 and F2 values between particular years, and differences in F1 values between performative and interview speech. I explore these shifts in relation to the hostility Malik has faced and study the causes of his shifting, particularly in terms of speaker agency and audience design (Bell 1984).
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Dinkin, Aaron J., and Robin Dodsworth. "Gradience, allophony, and chain shifts." Language Variation and Change 29, no. 1 (March 2017): 101–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0954394517000035.
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ABSTRACTThe monophthongization of /ay/ in the Southern United States is disfavored by following voiceless consonants (price) relative to voiced or word-final environments (prize). If monophthongization is the trigger for the Southern Shift (Labov, 2010) and chain shifts operate as predicted by a modular feedforward phonological theory (cf. Bermúdez-Otero, 2007), this implies price and prize must be two ends of a phonetic continuum, rather than two discrete allophones. We test this hypothesis via distributional analysis of offglide targets and statistical analysis of the effect of vowel duration. As predicted, we find price and prize share a continuous distribution in the Inland South, the region where the Southern Shift probably originated (Labov, Ash, & Boberg, 2006). We use Raleigh, North Carolina, outside the Inland South, as a comparison point; there, the same methodologies indicate price and prize are more discretely separated. Our results thus offer empirical support for the phonological theory that motivated the hypothesis.
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Glidden, Catherine, and Peter F. Assmann. "Effects of frequency shifts and visual gender information on vowel category judgments." Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 114, no. 4 (October 2003): 2336. http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/1.4781069.
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Carlson, Barry. "Some Thoughts on the Cause of Nasal to Vowel Shifts in Spokane." International Journal of American Linguistics 63, no. 3 (July 1997): 432–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/466339.
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Boberg, Charles. "Diva Diction." American Speech 95, no. 4 (November 1, 2020): 441–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00031283-8221002.
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As a follow-up to the author’s 2018 analysis of New York City English in film, this article turns its attention to the whole country over the same 80-year period of 1930–2010, using acoustic phonetic, quantitative, and statistical analysis to identify the most important changes in the pronunciation of North American English by 40 European American leading actresses in their best-known films. Focusing mostly on vowel production, the analysis reveals a gradual shift from East Coast patterns rooted in the speech of New York City to West Coast patterns rooted in the speech of Los Angeles. Changes include a decline in /r/ vocalization, which is restricted almost entirely to the period before the mid-1960s; a decline in the low back distinction between /o/ and /oh/ (lot and thought); a new distinction between /æ/ (trap) and its allophone before nasal consonants (e.g., ham or hand); shifts of /æ/ and /oh/ to a lower, more central position in the vowel space; and fronting of the back upgliding vowel /uw/ (goose). These and other patterns correspond closely to those identified in the speech of ordinary people, revealing an intriguing parallel between public speech in the mass media and private speech in local communities.
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Subtelny, Joanne, Walter Li, Robert Whitehead, and J. Daniel Subtelny. "Cephalometric and Cineradiographic Study of Deviant Resonance in Hearing-Impaired Speakers." Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorders 54, no. 2 (May 1989): 249–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.1044/jshd.5402.249.
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To study the physiological basis for deviant resonance in hearing-impaired speakers, cephalometric roentgenography and cineradiography were applied to analyze oral/pharyngeal relationships during vowels produced in isolation and within a sentence context. The films, synchronized with sound recording, were traced and measured for 10 normal hearing and 4 hearing-impaired women with deviant resonance. Vocal tract conformations and dimensions were defined by measures of the lips, tongue, mandible, velum, hyoid bone, epiglottis, and laryngeal sinus. Means, standard deviations, and analyses of variance were applied to facilitate descriptions and comparisons between the groups. The hearing-impaired speakers had near normal lip openings for/i/and/u/but more open positions for//. The tongue tended to retract for the front vowel and front for the back vowel/u/. For high vowels, most of the hearing-impaired speakers had an elevated hyoid, an unusually large vertical dimension between hyoid and laryngeal sinus, and a retracted tongue root, which was associated with a marked retraction or deflection of the epiglottis toward the pharyngeal wall. The cine analysis of the normal hearing speakers showed rather well defined and consistent shifts in tongue position for the front vowels produced in the sentence context. The hearing-impaired speakers with deviant resonance showed greater variation among speakers in tongue body position and a significant retrusion of the dorsum of the tongue at a site significantly lower than observed in hearing speakers. The consistent tongue root retraction during static as well as dynamic speech production is interpreted as support for Boone's hypothesized cause of pharyngeal resonance in speech of the hearing impaired.
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Nittrouer, Susan, and Michael Studdert-Kennedy. "The Role of Coarticulatory Effects in the Perception of Fricatives by Children and Adults." Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 30, no. 3 (September 1987): 319–29. http://dx.doi.org/10.1044/jshr.3003.319.
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Adult listeners are sensitive to the acoustic variations that result from a speaker's coarticulation (or coproduction) of phonetic segments. The present study charted the development of such sensitivity in young children by examining their responses to coarticulatory effects in fricative-vowel syllables. Children, at each of the ages 3, 4, 5, and 7 years, and adults identified tokens from a synthetic/∫/-/s/continuum followed by one of four natural vocalic portions:/i/and/u/, produced with transitions appropriate for either/∫/or/s/. Children demonstrated larger shifts in fricative phoneme boundaries as a function of vocalic transition than did adults, but relatively smaller shifts as a function of vowel quality. Responses were less consistent for children than for adults, and differences between children and adults decreased as children increased in age. Overall, these results indicate that perceptual sensitivity to certain coarticulatory effects is present at as young as 3 years of age. Moreover, the decrease in the sensitivity to vocalic transitions with age suggests that, contrary to a commonly held view, the perceptual organization of speech may become more rather than less segmental as the child develops.
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Stanford, James N., and Laurence A. Kenny. "Revisiting transmission and diffusion: An agent-based model of vowel chain shifts across large communities." Language Variation and Change 25, no. 2 (July 2013): 119–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0954394513000069.
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AbstractIn this study, we present the first agent-based simulation of vowel chain shifts across large communities, providing a parsimonious reinterpretation of Labov's (2007) notions of transmission, diffusion, and incrementation. Labov determined that parent-to-child transmission faithfully reproduces structural patterns such as the Northern Cities Shift (NCS), but adult-to-adult diffusion does not. NCS is transmitted faithfully to new generations of U.S. Inland North children. But St. Louis speakers, depending only on adult-adult contact, only attain an incomplete, unsystematic version. Labov (2007) attributed the difference to children's superior language-learning ability; transmission and diffusion are categorically different processes in that approach. By contrast, our multiagent simulation suggests that such transmission/diffusion effects can be derived by simple density of interactions and simple exemplar learning; we also find that incrementation is a natural outcome of this model. Unlike Labov (2007), this model does not require a dichotomy between transmission and diffusion. While dichotomous assumptions about child versus adult learning may be necessary in other contexts, our results suggest that the NCS effects in Labov (2007) may be explained economically in terms of simple density of interactions between speakers. Our results also provide an agent-based perspective supporting and explicating the notion of speech community.
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Vilcāne, Ilona. "VOWEL PECULIARITIES ASSOCIATED WITH CULTUROHISTORICAL BOUNDARIES IN THE RUDZĀTI SUBDIALECT." Via Latgalica, no. 7 (March 22, 2016): 139. http://dx.doi.org/10.17770/latg2015.7.1216.
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<p><em>This article expands upon the findings of the paper presented at the 8<sup>th</sup> International Conference of Latgalistics. The study is based more generally upon the author’s study that forms the basis of the Master’s thesis “The culturohistorical circumstances of the development of the Rudzāti subdialect”.</em></p><p><em>The Rudzāti<sub>437</sub> subdialect is spoken in contemporary Līvāni municipality in the parish of Rudzāti, and also in section Z of Rožupe parish. The neighboring subdialect ZR is Atašiene<sub>432, </sub>ZA – Stirniene<sub>433</sub>, A – Preiļi<sub>439</sub>, D – Vārkava<sub>438</sub>, bet R – Līvāni<sub>436</sub> (see Figure 1).</em></p><p><em>Since geographic, economic or political circumstances have differentiated groups of people (In Latvia, the largest factor is in the development of dialects has been the allocation of territory to different manor estates, Rudzīte 2005: 15), the aim of the research is to clarify which culturohistorical boundaries crossed the territory of the Rudzāti dialect until it became a single parish in 1925, which neighboring dialects influenced its development, and whether this is reflected in contemporary phonetic material, especially in the dialect’s vowel sounds.</em></p><p><em>Interviews conducted for the 2010–2012 ESF project “Their nest, their land – Latvian rural population development strategy and cultural change” were used in the research (ESF 2010–2012). Three Rudzāti speakers from the ZA subdialect area were also interviewed (Speaker interviews, 2015).</em></p><p><em>The most important factor in the analysis of the characteristics of the Rudzāti<sub>437</sub> dialect was the gathering of the most accurate sociolinguistic information possible about the speakers. It was especially important to discern the places of birth and current residence of the speakers, in order to detect peculiarities in the “endpoints” of the Rudzāti<sub>437 </sub>dialect and isolate these. For this reason, it was also important to query the place of birth of speakers’ parents. Attention was also paid to each speaker’s religious confession and denomination. The Ošas river was used as a conditional boundary line during analysis of speaker material, because this was the boundary between the counties of Rēzekne and Daugavpils during the Russian Imperial period, and speakers of the dialect were grouped according to which side of the river their place of residence was located.</em></p><em>In the study, correlations to the vowels and diphthongs of standard Latvian were analyzed in the Rudzāti dialect in addition to vowel deletions, reductions and insertions in the final syllables. Special attention was paid to instances in which vowel and diphthong shifts indicated the possibility of intersections with isoglosses. Such differences were found in shifts of the standard Latvian vowels e, ā, ē, ū and the diphthong ei.</em>
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Ababneh, Islam. "English Pronunciation Errors Made by Saudi Students." European Scientific Journal, ESJ 14, no. 2 (January 31, 2018): 244. http://dx.doi.org/10.19044/esj.2018.v14n2p244.
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Arabs often pronounce many English words wrongly which leads to spelling and writing errors. This paper deals with English pronunciation errors made by two groups of native Saudi Arab speakers. The students in the first group are of English major while the students in the second group are of Arabic major. Generally, Arabic speakers use direct transfer and interference from Arabic in addition to stress shifts in their pronunciation that are not recognized stress patterns in English. Also, there are some sounds in English that have no equivalence in Arabic, which leads to vowel and consonant errors. This study identifies the pronunciation errors made by Saudi students in pronouncing words of problematic nature to Arabs in general. The students in both groups made vowel insertion and confusion, orthography, stress, intonation, errors; but the more trained students in group 1 made less errors than the students in group 2.
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Hertrich, Ingo, and Hermann Ackermann. "Gender-Specific Vocal Dysfunctions in Parkinson's Disease: Electroglottographic and Acoustic Analyses." Annals of Otology, Rhinology & Laryngology 104, no. 3 (March 1995): 197–202. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/000348949510400304.
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Electroglottographic (EGG) and acoustic recordings were obtained during sustained vowel production in men and women suffering from Parkinson's disease (PD). The computed EGG spectrograms allowed us to differentiate various kinds of phonatory disturbances: intervals with subharmonic energy (“low-frequency segments”), “noise-like regions,” and abrupt shifts of fundamental frequency (F0). Female PD subjects presented with a significantly increased portion of subharmonic segments and with significantly more abrupt F0 shifts as compared to both controls and male PD subjects. Presumably, these alterations in spectral energy distribution reflect different oscillatory modes of the glottal source. Thus, PD seems to have a differential impact on phonation in men and women. Conceivably, these gender-specific vocal dysfunctions are determined by the well-known sexual dimorphism of laryngeal size.
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Fridland, Valerie. "The Southern Shift in Memphis, Tennessee." Language Variation and Change 11, no. 3 (October 1999): 267–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0954394599113024.
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This article investigates the Southern Vowel Shift—a possibly interrelated series of rotations in vowel space currently affecting the dialects of southern speakers—in terms of examining its classification as a chain-shift process and, more generally, providing a descriptive account of the phonetic character of the changes in each individual vowel class. Based on the work of Labov (1991, 1994) and Feagin (1986), it has been suggested that the Southern Shift involves changes in both the front vowels and the back vowels, with the tense and lax front vowel nuclei essentially switching places and the back vowels moving forward. The relationship of these changes in the front vowels and those in the back vowels has not been firmly established, but they appear to be driven by different social and linguistic forces. What is happening to the low front, the mid, and the low back vowel classes in the Southern Shift has only been superficially explored. A detailed instrumental analysis of the vowel systems of 25 native Memphians of selected ages, socioeconomic classes, and genders is presented, revealing the movement of vowel classes which seem to be playing an important role in the instigation or perpetuation of the Southern Shift. This analysis points out discrepancies about how previously cited vocalic changes are embedded in mid-southern speech and provides a picture of how these changes are affecting other changes in the system. The results suggest that, while many of the changes cited in the literature are indeed present in the sample, the interrelatedness of these changes and their prognosis to move to completion are not so clear.
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Wrzosek, Małgorzata, Justyna Maculewicz, Honorata Hafke-Dys, Agnieszka Nowik, Anna Preis, and Grzegorz Kroliczak. "Pitch Processing of Speech: Comparison of Psychoacoustic and Electrophysiological Data." Archives of Acoustics 38, no. 3 (September 1, 2013): 375–81. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/aoa-2013-0044.
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Abstract The present study consisted of two experiments. The goal of the first experiment was to establish the just noticeable differences for the fundamental frequency of the vowel /u/ by using the 2AFC method. We obtained the threshold value for 27 cents. This value is larger than the motor reaction values which had been observed in previous experiments (e.g. 9 or 19 cents). The second experiment was intended to provide neurophysiological confirmation of the detection of shifts in a frequency, using event-related potentials (ERPs). We concentrated on the mismatch negativity (MMN) - the component elicited by the change in the pattern of stimuli. Its occurrence is correlated with the discrimination threshold. In our study, MMN was observed for changes greater than 27 cents - shifts of ±50 and 100 cents (effect size - Cohen’s d = 2.259). MMN did not appear for changes of ±10 and 20 cents. The results showed that the values for which motor responses can be observed are indeed lower than those for perceptual thresholds.
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McElhinny, Bonnie. "More on the Third Dialect of English: Linguistic constraints on the use of three phonological variables in Pittsburgh." Language Variation and Change 11, no. 2 (July 1999): 171–95. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0954394599112031.
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Traditional dialect boundaries in the United States have received renewed attention (Labov, 1991, 1994). Labov outlined three dialects of English (the Northern Cities Chain Shift, the Southern Chain Shift, and the Third Dialect), the boundaries of which are defined by chain shifts in the vowel system and roughly correspond to traditional dialectal boundaries defined through the bundling of lexical items (Kurath, 1949) and phonological isoglosses (Kurath & McDavid, 1961). Other research has suggested that the Third Dialect may be the most heterogeneous of these dialects, with speakers in different areas displaying widely disparate behaviors (see, e.g., Clarke, Elms, & Youssef, 1995; Di Paolo, 1988; Di Paolo & Faber, 1990; Labov, 1996; Moonwomon, 1987). The present article contributes towards a richer picture of the Third Dialect by offering the first systematic variationist analysis of speech in Pittsburgh, with a particular focus on three phonological processes: vocalization of /l/, laxing of /i/ before /l/, and laxing of /u/ before /l/. I argue that Veatch's (1991) model of English syllable structure provides a unified account of these seemingly unrelated phonological changes in Pittsburgh; the implications of this argument for further research on Pittsburgh speech are also noted.
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Guenther, Frank H., Alfonso Nieto-Castanon, Satrajit S. Ghosh, and Jason A. Tourville. "Representation of Sound Categories in Auditory Cortical Maps." Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 47, no. 1 (February 2004): 46–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.1044/1092-4388(2004/005).
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Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to investigate the representation of sound categories in human auditory cortex. Experiment 1 investigated the representation of prototypical (good) and nonprototypical (bad) examples of a vowel sound. Listening to prototypical examples of a vowel resulted in less auditory cortical activation than did listening to nonprototypical examples. Experiments 2 and 3 investigated the effects of categorization training and discrimination training with novel nonspeech sounds on auditory cortical representations. The 2 training tasks were shown to have opposite effects on the auditory cortical representation of sounds experienced during training: Discrimination training led to an increase in the amount of activation caused by the training stimuli, whereas categorization training led to decreased activation. These results indicate that the brain efficiently shifts neural resources away from regions of acoustic space where discrimination between sounds is not behaviorally important (e.g., near the center of a sound category) and toward regions where accurate discrimination is needed. The results also provide a straightforward neural account of learned aspects of perceptual distortion near sound categories: Sounds from the center of a category are more difficult to discriminate from each other than sounds near category boundaries because they are represented by fewer cells in the auditory cortical areas.
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Langstrof, Christian. "On the role of vowel duration in the New Zealand English front vowel shift." Language Variation and Change 21, no. 3 (October 2009): 437–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0954394509990159.
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AbstractThis article investigates the role of vowel duration in the front vowel system of New Zealand English (NZE), drawing on data obtained from speakers born between the 1890s and the 1930s. After providing a brief overview of the history of short vowels in NZE, a comprehensive analysis of front vowel duration in conjunction with a number of earlier results from formant frequency measurements will be presented. It will be shown that the front vowel system of NZE shows interaction between vowel duration and formant frequency. A number of implications that follow from these patterns for the front vowel system of NZE will be discussed. It will be argued that it is reasonable to divide up the class of short front vowels in NZE into a short set (consisting only of one vowel) and a “not-so-short set.” In addition, it will be concluded that phonological class membership is irrelevant to making generalizations over patterns of movements in vowel change.
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Clarke, Sandra, Ford Elms, and Amani Youssef. "The third dialect of English: Some Canadian evidence." Language Variation and Change 7, no. 2 (July 1995): 209–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0954394500000995.
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ABSTRACTWhereas Labov (1991) made a case for the existence of three major dialects of English, this article offers Canadian evience that runs counter to the idea of a relatively homogeneous North American third dialect area in which vowel systems remain fairly stable. It shows that the lax vowels of Canadian English are undergoing a substantial shift, the pivot for which is suggested to be vowel merger in theCot/Caughtsets. This shift is to some degree conditioned by the voicing properties and the manner of articulation of a following consonant; gender differences prove significant as well. The article also examines back vowel fronting in Candian English and its relationship to the shift affecting the front lax vowels, as well as to the general principles of vowel chain shifting articulated by Labov (1994). The Canadian Shift raises the issue of internal versus external motivation of vowel change; in addition, it brings, macrosociolinguistic evidence to bear on the purely microsociolinguistic interpretation of similar patterns of vowel shifting as symbols of local group identity (Eckert, 1991b).
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Miller, Corey. "The Waziri Chain Shift." Journal of Persianate Studies 7, no. 1 (May 12, 2014): 124–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/18747167-12341267.
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Abstract The Waziri dialect of the Pashto language, spoken in Afghanistan and Pakistan, features a vowel shift with respect to other varieties of Pashto. Kieffer calls this process metaphony, but referring to it as a vowel shift facilitates comparison with similar phenomena in other languages. This shift involves three standard vowels, /ā/, /o/ and /u/, which in Waziri can shift to /o/, /e/ and /i/, respectively. We will discuss the phonetic processes involved, and find parallels in languages genetically near and far. In addition, we will discuss the status of the change, through the quantitative analysis of three geographically and chronologically separated glossaries (Lorimer, Hallberg, Septfonds).
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Schmidt, Deborah Schlindwein. "Vowel raising in Basaa: a synchronic chain shift." Phonology 13, no. 2 (August 1996): 239–67. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0952675700002116.
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Like many of the zone A Bantu languages of western equatorial Africa, Basaa, which is spoken over a large area to the north-east and east of Douala, Cameroon, shows an inventory of seven surface vowels (Guthrie 1953). The Basaa forms cited in this article, all of which are found in the comprehensive Dictionnaire Basaa-Français (Lemb & de Gastines 1973), are transcribed using the vowel symbols in (1):These vowel symbols differ from those used by Guthrie only in that the hooks are eliminated from underneath his [i] and [u] and the dots are eliminated from underneath his [???] and [???]. I assume for these vowels the characteristics indicated in (1), where non-parenthesised feature specifications are a property of surface phonological representation and parenthesised feature specifications are default phonetic values. Following Hyman's (1988) analysis of Esimbi, another Cameroonian language containing these vowels in its inventory, I take [E] and [ɔ] to be low.The verb roots in (2) contain instances of each of the seven surface vowels of Basaa:Though bare verb roots may surface unsuffixed, suffixal extensions may also be added to give applied, passive, habitual, direct causative, indirect causative, simultaneous, associative, possessive, reversive, reflexive, stative and nominalised forms. Of interest to us is the vowel raising induced within the verb root when certain of these suffixal extensions are added. In (3) we see the CVC verb forms of (2) along with their corresponding applied and indirect causative forms:Other suffixal extensions that induce raising are the passive, direct causative, simultaneous, reversive and stative extensions. For example, these other suffixal extensions attach to /ten/, one of the verb roots in (3), to give [tina], [tinis], [tinha], [tinil] and [tiní], respectively.
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Roeder, Rebecca, and Lidia-Gabriela Jarmasz. "The Canadian Shift in Toronto." Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique 55, no. 3 (November 2010): 387–404. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0008413100001614.
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AbstractThis study provides the first wide-scale, apparent time, instrumental description of the Canadian Shift in mainstream Toronto English. In contrast with some previous findings, the Toronto data suggest that for the last 70 years or more the shift has not affected the high front lax vowel (i). We observe that the movement of the nonhigh front lax vowels (ε) and (æ) involves both lowering and retraction in Toronto English, although retraction is the primary direction of more recent change and the shift appears to be slowing down. Our findings also suggest that continued retraction of the vowel resulting from the low back merger is involved in the final stage of the shift. We do not find evidence of a chain shift but instead propose that a parallel shift is occurring and make reference to Vowel Dispersion Theory in our discussion.
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Levitt, Andrea G., and Jennifer G. Aydelott Utman. "From babbling towards the sound systems of English and French: a longitudinal two-case study." Journal of Child Language 19, no. 1 (February 1992): 19–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0305000900013611.
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ABSTRACTThe utterances of one French and one American infant at 0;5, 0;8, 0;11, and 1;2 were transcribed and acoustically analysed for syllable duration and vowel formant values. Both general and language-specific effects emerged in the longitudinal study. Initial similarities in the consonantal repertoires of both infants, increasing control in producing targetF1andF2values, and developmental changes in babbling characteristics over time seem to reflect universal patterns. Yet the babbling of the infants differed in ways that appear to be due to differences in their language environments. Shifts in the infants' sound repertoires reflected phoneme frequencies in the adult languages. The English-learning infant produced more closed syllables, which is characteristic of English, than the French-learning infant. The French-learning infant tended to produce more regularly-timed nonfinal syllables and showed significantly more final-syllable lengthening (both characteristic of French) than the English-learning infant.
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Prichard, Hilary. "Northern dialect evidence for the chronology of the Great Vowel Shift." Journal of Linguistic Geography 2, no. 2 (October 2014): 87–102. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/jlg.2014.9.
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This paper demonstrates how the tools of dialect geography may fruitfully lend a new perspective to historical data in order to address the lingering questions left by previous analyses. A geographic examination ofSurvey of English Dialectsdata provides evidence in favor of a push-chain analysis of the Great Vowel Shift, in which the Middle English high-mid long vowels raised before the high long vowels were diphthongized. It is also demonstrated that the so-called “irregular” dialect outcomes, which have previously been cited as evidence for a lack of unity of the Great Vowel Shift, are no longer problematic when viewed in the light of a theory of dialect contact, and can in fact refine our understanding of the chronology and geographic extent of the shift itself.
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Lisker, Leigh. "On the Interpretation of Vowel “Quality”: The Dimension of Rounding." Journal of the International Phonetic Association 19, no. 1 (July 1989): 24–30. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0025100300005880.
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The usual description of vowels in respect to their “phonetic quality” requires the linguist to locate them within a so-called “vowel space,” apparently articulatory in nature, and having three dimensions labeled high-low (or close-open), front-back, and unrounded-rounded. The first two are coordinates of tongue with associated jaw position, while the third specifies the posture of the lips. It is recognized that vowels can vary qualitatively in ways that this three-dimensional space does not account for. So, for example, vowels may differ in degree of nasalization, and they may be rhotacized or r-colored. Moreover, it is recognized that while this vowel space serves important functions within the community of linguists, both the two measures of tongue position and the one for the lips inadequately identify those aspects of vocal tract shapes that are primarily responsible for the distinctive phonetic qualities of vowels (Ladefoged 1971). With all this said, it remains true enough that almost any vowel pair of different qualities can be described as occupying different positions with the space. Someone hearing two vowels in sequence and detecting a quality difference will presumably also be able to diagnose the nature of the articulatory shift executed in going from one vowel to the other.
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Jurgec, Peter. "Opacity in Šmartno Slovenian." Phonology 36, no. 2 (May 2019): 265–301. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0952675719000137.
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Šmartno is a critically endangered dialect of Slovenian that exhibits three interacting processes: final devoicing, unstressed high vowel deletion and vowel–glide coalescence. Their interaction is opaque: final obstruents devoice, unless they become final due to vowel deletion; high vowels delete, but not when created by coalescence. These patterns constitute a synchronic chain shift that leads to two emergent contrasts: final obstruent voicing and vowel length (due to compensatory lengthening). The paper examines all nominal paradigms, and complements them with an acoustic analysis of vowel duration and obstruent voicing. This work presents one of the most thoroughly documented instances of counterfeeding opacity on environment.