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Example

"Well, I didn't find out about that until, like, recently."

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Canadian raising

mouth /aʊ/ (and price /aɪ/) are:

"High" before voiceless obstruents:

  • shout, house: [ʌʊ]
  • white, knife: [ɐɪ]

"Low" elsewhere:

  • how, found, houses: [ɑʊ]
  • high, find: [aɪ]


Joos, M. 1942. "A phonological dilemma in Canadian English". Language 18, 141–144.

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/aɪ/-raising in North America (Labov et al. 2006)

60 Hz difference in F1 of nuclei in pre-voiceless /aɪ/ vs. elsewhere

  • Canada
  • the North
  • the North Central Region
  • Eastern New England
  • Western Pennsylvania

Labov, W., Ash, S., & Boberg, C. (2006). The Atlas of North American English. Mouton de Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110167467

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/aʊ/-raising in North America

Place Source
Fredricksberg, VA Primer (1890)
Coastal Maine and southern New Hampshire Kurath & McDavid (1961)
Canada Joos (1942)
"northern states" Thomas (1961)
Martha's Vineyard, MA Labov (1963)
Charlston, South Carolina Chambers (1973)
Minneapolis, MN & Rochester, NY Vance (1987)
Calais, ME Miller (1989)
Ann Arbor, MI Dailey-O'Cain (1997)
"Northern parts of Midwest and West" Gordon (2004)
Vermont Roberts (2007)
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Types of conditioning of raising

/aɪ/

Voice-based (Canada, Joos (1942)):

  • sight [ʌi] (raised)
  • side [aɪ] (not raised)
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Types of conditioning of raising

/aɪ/

Voice-based (Canada, Joos (1942)):

  • sight [ʌi] (raised)
  • side [aɪ] (not raised)

/aʊ/

Voice-based (Canada, Joos (1942)):

  • shout [ʌu] (raised)
  • found [aʊ] (not raised)

Context-free (e.g. Vermont, Roberts (2007)):

  • about [ʌu]
  • found [ʌu]
  • how [ʌu]
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Many distinct New England features (e.g. r-lessness, PALM and START fronting, NORTH/FORCE distinction, MARY/MARRY/MERRY distinction) are receding (Stanford 2019).




How does /aʊ/-raising fit into this picture?

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Some existing research on /aʊ/-raising in New England

  • Labov (1963)

    • Martha's Vineyard in Eastern Massachusetts
    • Some speakers with context-free raising, some voice-based (with exceptions)
    • Raising as local identity marker (island-oriented fishermen)
    • Described as a new development

  • Boberg (2010) (4 speakers)

    • eastern New England
    • 110Hz voicing-based difference in F1 of /aʊ/
  • Labov, W. (1963). The social motivation of a sound change. Word, 19(3), 273–309.
  • Boberg, C. (2011). The English Language in Canada. Cambridge University Press.
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Kim et al. (2019) all of New England (626 spkrs)

/aɪ/ raising

No /aʊ/ raising

Kim, C., Reddy, S., Stanford, J. N., Wyschogrod, E., & Grieve, J. (2019). Bring on the Crowd! Using Online Audio Crowd-Sourcing for Large-Scale New England Dialectology and Acoustic Sociophonetics. American Speech, 94(2), 151–194. https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-7251252

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Kim et al. (2019) all of New England

Context-free /aʊ/ raising?

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New England's Hub: Eastern Massachusetts

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Stanford's (2019) Hub study

  • "/aʊ/ tends to be fronted [my emphasis] in the not voiceless environment"
  • "this may be a topic for future study"

Stanford, J. (2019). New England English: Large-scale acoustic sociophonetics and dialectology. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

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Research questions

  1. Is /aʊ/ raising, backing, or both?
  2. How is /aʊ/ affected by voicing of following sound?
  3. Are speakers aware of variation in /aʊ/?
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Speakers

20 women (age range: [18, 29], median: 20)

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Method

  • One-hour-long interviews (phonetics lab at UMass, Amherst)
  • Automatic Speech Recognition with WebMAUS
  • Force-alignment with FAVE-Align (Rosenfelder et al. 2014)
    • Recordings and TextGrids for 17 spkrs available at: osf.io/mfu5y
  • Automatic acoustic measurements with FAVE-Extract (Rosenfelder et al. 2014)
    • Single-point measurements: /aɪ/: at F1 maximum; /aʊ/: halfway between F1 maximum and onset
    • Incremental measurements, in steps of 15% of a vowel's duration
  • Analyzed in (R Core Team 2021)
  • Datasets presented here:
    • /aɪ/: 15,296 tokens; 477 word types
    • /aʊ/: 2,648 tokens; 161 word types
    • only vowels at least 50ms long included
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Results 1: Single-point measurements

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Voiced-based allophony

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Voice-based /aɪ/ raising

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Voice-based /aɪ/ raising

No voice-based /aʊ/ raising

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Voice-based /aɪ/ raising

Voice-based /aʊ/ backing

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Voice-based /aʊ/ backing

Voice-based /aʊ/ backing

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Context-free raising

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Context-free raising of /aʊ/ with regard to what?

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Context-free raising of /aʊ/ with regard to what?

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Context-free raising of /aʊ/ with regard to TRAP

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Single-point measurements - summary of results:

  • /aʊ/ is backed, but not raised before voiceless obstruents
  • /aʊ/ is raised context-free
  • ⚠ only the nucleus considered ⚠
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Results 2: Dynamic aspects of /aʊ/

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Generalized Additive Modeling (GAM)

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Generalized Additive Modeling (GAM)

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Generalized Additive Modeling (GAM)

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Below or above the level of consciousness?

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Are speakers aware of /aʊ/?

Yes?

"And then I say South weird [...]"

"I say outfit [...]"

"I say about [...]"

No?

" [...] I'll say things around my house"

"He would talk about [...] the roundabout [...]"

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Attitude to Eastern Massachusetts

Negative

  • "These people are scary!"

Positive

  • "[...] he came to class, like, wicked prepared [...]"

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Conclusions

  • Regardless of environment:

    • nucleus of /aʊ/ is raised with regard to the lowest vowel (i.e. to /æ/)

  • Before voiceless obstruents:

    • nucleus of /aʊ/ is backed
    • off-glide of /aʊ/ is raised

  • Realization of /aʊ/ may carry indexical meaning

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Example

"Well, I didn't find out about that until, like, recently."

2 / 34
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