No abstract

Contemporary New Zealand English has distinctive pronunciations of three characteristic vowels. Did the evolution of these distinctive pronunciations occur in all words at the same time or were different words affected differently? We analyze the changing pronunciation of New Zealand English in a large set of recordings of speakers born over a 130 year period. We show that low frequency words were at the forefront of these changes and higher frequency words lagged behind. A long-standing debate exists between authors claiming that high frequency words lead regular sound change and others claiming that there are no frequency effects. The leading role of low frequency words is surprising in this context. It can be elucidated in models of lexical processing that include detailed word-specific memories.

A B S T R A C TRecent research has suggested that the contribution of individual sociolinguistic variables to the social perception of a speaker is influenced by other available information about the speaker (Campbell-Kibler, 2007;Pharao, Maegaard, Spindler Møller, & Kristiansen, 2014). Here we investigate the impact of listener awareness of regional sociolinguistic variation on sociolinguistic perception. Specifically, we compare how the social meanings attributed to word-internal, preconsonantal /s/ differ based on whether the listeners and speakers use predominantly /s/-weakening Puerto Rican Spanish or predominantly non-/s/-weakening Mexican Spanish. We find that for measures of status, Puerto Rican and Mexican listeners both show a smaller effect of /s/ when rating Puerto Rican as opposed to Mexican speakers. However, we see no effect of speaker nationality on heteronormativity, and Puerto Rican listeners and male Mexican listeners rate strong /s/ as less heteronormative across the board. Mexican female listeners, however, rate strong /s/ as more heteronormative. These results suggest that listeners integrate their own local ideologies with their understanding of regional differences when socially evaluating language variation.

Twenty women from Christchurch, New Zealand and 16 from Columbus Ohio (dialect region U.S. Midland) participated in a bimodal lexical naming task where they repeated monosyllabic words after four speakers from four regional dialects: New Zealand, Australia, U.S. Inland North and U.S. Midland. The resulting utterances were acoustically analyzed, and presented to listeners on Amazon Mechanical Turk in an AXB task. Convergence is observed, but differs depending on the dialect of the speaker, the dialect of the model, the particular word class being shadowed, and the order in which dialects are presented to participants. We argue that these patterns are generally consistent with findings that convergence is promoted by a large phonetic distance between shadower and model (Babel, 2010, contra Kim et al., 2011), and greater existing variability in a vowel class (Babel, 2012). The results also suggest that more comparisons of accommodation toward different dialects are warranted, and that the investigation of the socio-indexical meaning of specific linguistic forms in context is a promising avenue for understanding variable selectivity in convergence.

Can the topic of a conversation, when heavily associated with a particular dialect region, influence how a speaker realizes a linguistic variable? We interviewed fans of English Premier League soccer at a pub in Columbus, Ohio. Nine speakers of British English and eleven speakers of American English were interviewed about their favorite American football and English soccer teams. We present evidence that the soccer fans in this speech community produce variants more consistent with Standard American English when talking about American football than English soccer. Specifically, speakers were overall more /r/-ful (F3 values were lower in rhotic environments) when talking about their favorite American football team. Numeric trends in the data also suggest that exposure to both American and British English, being a fan of both sports, and task may mediate these effects.