Northern Cities Mexican American English: Vowel Production and Perception

This is a study of the competition of linguistic systems within the speech community, tracing the opposition of distinct phonological configurations. Among younger Philadelphians oriented to higher education, the traditional short-a system is giving way to the nasal system, in which all prenasal vowels are tense. We present evidence that this shift occurs systematically in both the lax and tense allophones. The degree of conformity to each system is measured for 106 subjects by the Pillai statistic; community-wide patterns are revealed by regression modeling and bimodality diagrams. Adherence to the traditional system is greatest for White speakers who graduated from Catholic high schools, while the nasal system is strongest for graduates from elite schools with special admission requirements. African American students show no orientation to the traditional system, but parallel White students in the shift to the nasal system. The histories of students through the educational system show that the speaker's short-a system is largely determined during their middle and high school years, before entering college. Special admission interviews play a special role in this process, as brief speech events that strongly determine the person's linguistic environment for the years that follow.

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“… 4. This vigorous expansion of the nasal system in Lansing was reported in an earlier study of 12 female speakers in that city by Roeder (2010). …”

Section: Notessupporting

confidence: 79%

Competing systems in Philadelphia phonology

et al. 2016

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“…They found that listeners with greater degrees of /eɪ/ centralization in their own speech classified more central stimuli as /eɪ/ than nonshifted listeners did (see also Fridland & Kendall, 2012; Kendall & Fridland, 2012). This is one of the clearest demonstrations of an association between production and perception in ongoing vowel shifts; it supports the view, voiced by Roeder (2010:179), that “individuals have a more difficult time understanding pronunciations that they themselves do not use, even if those pronunciations reflect standard local norms.”…”

Section: Perception Studysupporting

confidence: 76%

Producing and perceiving the Canadian Vowel Shift: Evidence from a Montreal community

Kettig

Winter

2017

Lang Var Change

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This paper investigates interspeaker variation in the mid and low short vowels of Jewish Montreal English, analyzing the Canadian Shift in both production and perception. In production, we find that young women are leading in the retraction of /æ/ and the lowering and retraction of /ε/. We furthermore find that across speakers, the retraction of /æ/ is correlated with the lowering and retraction of /ε/, providing quantitative evidence that the movements of these two vowels are linked. The trajectory implied by our production data differs from what was reported in Montreal approximately one generation earlier. In contrast to reliable age differences in production, a vowel categorization task shows widespread intergenerational agreement in perception, highlighting a mismatch: in this speech community, there is evidently more systematic variation in production than in perception. We suggest that this is because all individuals are exposed to both innovative and conservative variants and must perceptually accommodate accordingly.

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“…These "simplified" structures are also less marked, in linguistic terms, and are typical of child speech (Fabiano-Smith & Barlow, 2010). As far as the available evidence suggests, heritage speaker speech does not demonstrate this quality (Chang, Yao, Haynes, & Rhodes, 2011;Henriksen, 2015;Kim, 2015;Rao & Ronquest, 2015;Roeder, 2010;Ronquest, 2012, among others). Heritage speaker speech does, however, seem to exhibit crosslinguistic influence from the dominant language into the heritage language and from the heritage language into the dominant language.…”

Section: Dominance and Proficiency In Heritage Speaker Speechmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dominance, Proficiency, and Spanish Heritage Speakers’ Production of English and Spanish Vowels

Shea

2017

Stud Second Lang Acquis

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This study examines how dominance and proficiency relate to Spanish heritage speaker vowel productions. Participants’ normalized vowel measurements were compared to nonheritage native speakers of Spanish and English using the Pillai score, an output of Multivariate Analysis of Variances (MANOVAs) that allows comparisons across distributions of two or more dependent variables. With Pillai scores as the dependent variable, we created two multiple regression models for each language, one with factors related to dominance, one with factors related to proficiency. We use commonality analysis (variance partitioning) to determine the unique and shared contribution of each variable to the regression models. The results showed different patterns of unique and shared variance across English and Spanish for the factors related to dominance and also for proficiency. Given this, we maintain that it is important to preserve dominance and proficiency as separate but related constructs when considering heritage speaker linguistic data.

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Northern Cities Mexican American English: Vowel Production and Perception

Cited by 45 publications

References 15 publications

Competing systems in Philadelphia phonology

Competing systems in Philadelphia phonology

Producing and perceiving the Canadian Vowel Shift: Evidence from a Montreal community

Dominance, Proficiency, and Spanish Heritage Speakers’ Production of English and Spanish Vowels

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