Operationalizing Style: Quantifying the Use of Style Shift in the Speech of African American Adolescents

Abstract

The vast majority of research to date on African American Vernacular English style shift has taken the form of qualitative analyses of individual case studies; however, despite its great success, in focusing on individual rather than group style and style shifting, such work by itself is unable to answer key questions about style and style shift at the level of social groups, communities of practice, and broader based communities. Recent quantitative analyses, such as Craig and Washington's (2006) Dialect Density Measure (DDM), have sought to capture stylistic variation at the group level by analyzing dozens of linguistic features meant to represent a dialect, but use of such large numbers of features severely restricts the types of statistical analyses that can be applied to a given data set and therefore limits the utility of the technique. To test whether a smaller subset of features can be used to quantify stylistic variation, we analyzed a sample of 108 sixth-grade students observed in two conditions that differed in formality. Three measures were used to track changes in style, two large-scale DDMs constructed from a set of more than 40 variables and a subset measure that used only 6 variables. Analyses indicate that the larger DDMs were highly correlated with the subset measure, thus indicating that a small number of features can be used to reliably reflect shifting styles.

The social and linguistic in the acquisition of sociolinguistic norms: Caregivers, children, and variation

“…The emergence of adult-like patterns of style shifting appear to be in place at least at pre-adolescence (e.g., Hoyle and Adger 1998;Cheshire 1978Cheshire , 1982Purcell 1984;Renn and Terry 2009) with evidence of meta-awareness of informal and formal variants also attested (e.g., Reid 1978;Romaine 1978Romaine , 1984Chevrot et al 2000). Studies which include a range of ages may provide further insights.…”

“…How much earlier, however, is still subject to some debate. Some suggest that systematic patterns are acquired in the preadolescent years e.g., 10-12 (e.g., Reid 1978;Renn and Terry 2009;Romaine 1984;Chevrot et al 2000), others in the first school years i.e., 6-8years old (e.g. , Labov 1989;Patterson 1992).…”

Real-time evidence for age grad(ing) in late adolescence

“…A followup to the Montreal French panel study (Sankoff, Wagner, & Jensen, forthcoming) found that speaker style had no significant effect on the increase in inflected future use over panelists' life spans. Renn (2009Renn ( , 2011 and Renn and Terry (2009) measured style-shifting for 43 of the panelists in the Van Hofwegen and Wolfram data, finding that speakers' range of style generally increased as they aged. Ultimately, however, neither of the large studies can explain the individual differences without more detailed ethnographic information, whereas the smaller studies are unable to untangle the effects of social and/or stylistic factors.…”

Influences of Social and Style Variables on Adult Usage of African American English Features

“…Wolfram and colleagues (Renn & Wolfram, 2009; Van Hofwegen & Wolfram, 2009) have hypothesized that AAE feature production rates are age-graded, with peak periods prior to first grade, a dip between first and fourth grades, and increasing usage beyond fourth grade. Although no direct comparisons between children and adults were possible in this study, the present findings are suggestive that early adulthood may be another period of relatively high usage.…”

“…Oetting and Pruitt (2005) demonstrated that focusing on a smaller core set of AAE features rather than a larger range of potential features when calculating DDM was informative and highly efficient. Overall DDMs are robust, and minor variations in the calculation method yield relatively inconsequential differences (Renn & Terry, 2009). …”