The ability to discern the use of a nonstandard dialect is often enough information to also determine the speaker's ethnicity, and speakers may consequently suffer discrimination based on their speech. This article, detailing four experiments, shows that housing discrimination based solely on telephone conversations occurs, dialect identification is possible using the word hello, and phonetic correlates of dialect can be discovered. In one experiment, a series of telephone surveys was conducted; housing was requested from the same landlord during a short time period using standard and nonstandard dialects. The results demonstrate that landlords discriminate against prospective tenants on the basis of the sound of their voice during telephone conversations. Another experiment was conducted with untrained participants to confirm this ability; listeners identified the dialects significantly better than chance. Phonetic analysis reveals that phonetic variables potentially distinguish the dialects.

No abstract

American sociolinguists have largely ignored obstruents as invariant, including how speakers distinguish /s, t/ from /z, d/. Upper Midwestern final obstruents provide clear evidence that the realization of such contrasts can and does vary. In a once German-speaking Wisconsin town, we have found that speakers systematically produce final laryngeal distinctions differently than reported for American English, with an apparent partial neutralization of the distinction. Here, we seek the historical antecedents of this pattern, comparing acoustic characteristics of recordings from speakers throughout the region born from 1866-1986. Analysis by date of birth shows distinct obstruent phonetics over this whole period, revealing striking changes in which acoustic cues have been exploited to maintain the distinction: The oldest speakers used primarily glottal pulsing, younger ones exhibit a "trading relation" between pulsing and preceding-vowel duration, and the youngest have reduced the acoustic cues of the distinction dramatically.This article provides evidence that the phonetics of laryngeal or "voicing" distinctions in regional American English, observable in minimal pairs sing~zing, bussing~buzzing, hiss~his, vary and change in systematic and previously unappreciated ways. Examination of multiple acoustic characteristics for the phonological voicing distinction in syllable codas indicates that the cues are used in tandem, and

A once predominantly German-speaking community in Watertown, Wisconsin,shows distinct phonetic and phonological traces of that immigrant heritage in the speech of its English-speaking monolinguals. Acoustic and perceptual studies suggest that speakers do not produce all the expected cues for English fi nal laryngeal distinctions, nor do they exploit those cues to the same degree as a set of control speakers. This instance, for which the language varieties and contact situation involved are all well understood, provides good evidence for structural influence from a substrate and provides a challenge to conventional views of language contact.

Old English underwent diachronic change in its vowel inventory between its predecessor West Germanic and Middle English. We provide an analysis of the addition and loss of vowels in Old English from the perspective of modified contrastive specification (Dresher et al. 1994). Three main themes emerge from our analysis: (i) the phonological representation of contrast in the vowels in English has remained remarkably stable for over a thousand years, (ii) the proposed analysis improves upon and supersedes similar analyses proposed in Dresher 2015 and Purnell & Raimy 2015, and (iii) the adoption of privative features provides an improved representationally based understanding of phonological activity, feature geometry, and how phonology reflects general cognitive features of memory.*

This article analyzes prevelar raising of /æ/, a restructuring present in the Upper Midwestern United States, from an articulatory perspective. Labov, Ash, and Boberg raise the question as to where this phenomenon lies within the range of uniform gestures. The present article describes lingual, mandibular, and labial movements in producing raised and unraised /æ/ in order to answer the question as to why /æg/ is elevated in the vowel space above /æk/ even when speakers are not participating in the prevelar raising. Results of a study of speakers who raise /æ/ before /g/ compared to a cohort of nonraisers reveal that in addition to a more anterior gesture for /æ/ before /g/ than before /k/, there is statistically significant lip repositioning associated with the raising gesture. The results highlight limitations of sound change descriptions when only acoustic data is available.

One of the questions I asked in the little survey on the first day was this:English in the United States has been significantly shaped by the immigrants and their languages. This reading should give you an overview of how to start thinking about this very complex question.Note on all articles for the course: One thing I'm really pleased with so far is your willingness to speak up. (OK, the first couple of questions raised didn't get quick responses, but that's forgivable!) For this class to succeed and for you to get the most out of it, we need robust discussion. You should come to every class prepared to answer questions and ask questions. (And you should feel free to ask challenging questions … there's very little secure 'wisdom' in this area and our work this semester will advance knowledge more if we ask hard questions and challenge accepted positions, including my own.) You should also ask me before or after class about things and/or email me.

Although researchers have used phone surveys for decades, the lack of an accurate picture of the call opening reduces our ability to train interviewers to succeed. Sample members decide about participation quickly. We predict participation using the earliest moments of the call; to do this, we analyze matched pairs of acceptances and declinations from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study using a case-control design and conditional logistic regression. We focus on components of the first speaking turns: acoustic-prosodic components and interviewer’s actions. The sample member’s “hello” is external to the causal processes within the call and may carry information about the propensity to respond. As predicted by Pillet-Shore (2012), we find that when the pitch span of the sample member’s “hello” is greater the odds of participation are higher, but in contradiction to her prediction, the (less reliably measured) pitch pattern of the greeting does not predict participation. The structure of actions in the interviewer’s first turn has a large impact. The large majority of calls in our analysis begin with either an “efficient” or “canonical” turn. In an efficient first turn, the interviewer delays identifying themselves (and thereby suggesting the purpose of the call) until they are sure they are speaking to the sample member, with the resulting efficiency that they introduce themselves only once. In a canonical turn, the interviewer introduces themselves and asks to speak to the sample member, but risks having to introduce themselves twice if the answerer is not the sample member. The odds of participation are substantially and significantly lower for an efficient turn compared to a canonical turn. It appears that how interviewers handle identification in their first turn has consequences for participation; an analysis of actions could facilitate experiments to design first interviewer turns for different target populations, study designs, and calling technologies.