November 1, 2013

Guest Speaker: Morgan Sonderegger (Nov 1)

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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