Morgan Sonderegger is visiting from McGill (
http://people.linguistics.mcgill.ca/~morgan/), and will talk about "The
dynamics of sounds on reality television" -- see abstract below.
The talk will take place in Sid Smith 560A (basement of Sid Smith),
starting at 3:10pm.
A reception in the department lounge will follow.
"The dynamics of sounds on reality television"
To what extent does an individual’s phonetics and phonology change during
adulthood? Previous work has addressed this question on two timescales.
In short-term laboratory settings, aspects of one's speech shift in
response to the speech of others (e.g. Nielsen, 2008; Babel, 2009). It has
been hypothesized that the accumulation of such shifts is an important
source of accent change in individuals and sound change in communities
(Delvaux & Soquet, 2007). However, studies of phonetic or phonological
variables in individuals at times years apart have found huge variability:
there is often no evidence for change for a majority of individuals, while
a minority change significantly (e.g. Evans & Iverson, 2007; Sankoff &
Blondeau, 2007). What is the link between the different patterns seen in
short-term convergence and long-term dynamics? And more generally, what do
phonetic and phonological dynamics in individuals look like at time
scales in between?
We address these questions by investigating ‘medium-term’ trajectories of
phonetic and phonological variation in a British reality television show,
where speakers live in an isolated house for three months. We examine five
variables in spontaneous speech from 12 contestants: voice onset time,
coronal stop deletion, and formant frequencies for three vowels. As a
preliminary step, we build a model of synchronic variation for each
variable; these models yield interesting and surprising findings with
respect to previous work. We then analyze the trajectory of each variable
within individual speakers, controlling for linguistic factors.
Variability is the norm: speakers and variables show several qualitatively
different types of dynamics, with a significant minority showing stability.
There is some evidence that particular speakers (across variables) and
variables (across speakers) have characteristic dynamics. Long-term time
trends do sometimes occur, which could be due to accumulation of short-term
shifts. By contrast, day-by-day variation is very common. Our results
suggest a tentative account of the relationship between short-term and
long-term dynamics, and directions for future work.
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