Contextualizing /s/ retraction: Sibilant variation and change in Washington D.C. African American Language

Abstract

Recent work has demonstrated an ongoing change across varieties of English in which /s/ retracts before consonants, particularly before /tɹ/ clusters (e.g., Lawrence, 2000; Shapiro, 1995; Stuart-Smith et al., 2019). Much of this work has focused on the social and linguistic distributions of /stɹ/ within single communities, without an examination of the broader sibilant space (e.g., /s/ and /ʃ/). Meanwhile, analyses across multiple corpora have shown that /s/ and /ʃ/ also show within-community variability, beyond /stɹ/ contexts (Stuart-Smith et al., 2019, 2020). Intersecting these approaches, this paper explores sibilant variation and change across /stɹ/, /s/, and /ʃ/ using a corpus of Washington D.C. African American Language (AAL). Results indicate that /stɹ/-retraction is a stable variant in this variety of AAL and /s/ and /ʃ/ show evidence of socially stratified variation and change. Overall, this paper demonstrates the need to examine the sibilant space more holistically when examining changes in /stɹ/.

Language variation in teacher speech in a dual immersion preschool

“…( The realization of sibilants was measured by several acoustic parameters, including sibilant duration, F2 value at the onset of the following vowel, and spectral moments analysis of the target sibilant (Li 2009). Although /s/ and /ʃ/ can be identified as categorical phonetic contrasts, many previous acoustic studies have pointed out that the sibilant space or the space between the constriction points of /s/ and /ʃ/ is continuous in the same axis of front-back articulation (Gunter, Vaughn, & Kendall 2021;Li 2009;Li & Munson 2016). Recent studies showed that the phonetic distinction between /s/ and /ʃ/could be captured by spectral moments analysis which consists of the first spectral moment (M1) or the centroid frequency, the second spectral moment (M2) or the standard deviation of the fricative spectrum, the third spectral moment (M3) or the skewness of the spectral shape, and the fourth spectral moment (M4) or the kurtosis of the spectral shape (Li 2009;Reidy 2016).…”