{"title":"Cumulative exposure to fast speech conditions duration of content words in English","authors":"E. K. Brown","doi":"10.1017/S0954394523000157","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954394523000157","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper tests the idea that the speech rate with which surrounding words are spoken affects the mental representation of words and conditions production of words. This possibility is operationalized by measuring a word's ratio of occurrence in speaker-relative fast speech. Other variables shown in the literature to influence speech rate are controlled for in a 10,000-iteration bootstrapping procedure of a mixed-effect linear regression model. The results of the analysis of 39,397 tokens of content words from 1,232 word types in English display a significant effect for a word's ratio of conditioning in speaker-relative fast speech, although the effect size is small or very small. Other variables shown in the literature to condition speech rate also significantly condition speech rate here. This paper suggests that in addition to other aspects of the context of use of words, contextual speech rate also influences the mental representation of words.","PeriodicalId":46949,"journal":{"name":"Language Variation and Change","volume":"35 1","pages":"153 - 173"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47902861","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“I can't see myself ever living any[w]ere else”: Variation in (HW) in Edinburgh English","authors":"Nina Markl","doi":"10.1017/S0954394523000078","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954394523000078","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Sociolinguistic research across Scotland in recent decades has documented an erosion of the phonemic contrast between /ʍ/ (as in which) and /w/ (as in witch). Based on acoustic phonetic analysis of 1,400 realizations produced by eighteen Edinburgh women born between 1938 and 1993, I argue that in the context of Edinburgh this is best understood as a complex sociolinguistic variable (HW) encompassing (at least) six fricated and fricationless variants. Realizations vary in type and relative duration of frication, voicing, and glide quality. Bayesian statistical analysis suggests that choice and realization of variants is conditioned by speaker's social class, style, and phonetic context. Unlike some prior work, I do not find evidence of ongoing (apparent-time) change or an effect of contact with Southern British English. Fricated variants are most prevalent in formal speech styles and in the speech of middle-class women, while working-class speakers favor fricationless variants.","PeriodicalId":46949,"journal":{"name":"Language Variation and Change","volume":"35 1","pages":"79 - 105"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46506827","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Intra- and interspeaker repetitiveness in Chengdu Mandarin locative variation","authors":"Aini Li, Meredith Tamminga, Hai Hu","doi":"10.1017/S095439452300008X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S095439452300008X","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In producing linguistic variation, language users display a tendency to reuse the same variant. This paper compares the empirical properties of different types of repetitiveness in a single case study: locative variation in Chengdu Mandarin. Using conversational data from sociolinguistic interviews, we ask whether within-speaker repetitiveness (persistence) and cross-speaker repetitiveness (convergence) behave similarly with respect to (1) their sensitivity to the linguistic similarity of the prime and target, and (2) their tendency to decline with greater temporal distance between the prime and target. Our results suggest that intraspeaker persistence and interspeaker convergence behave similarly in both respects. We therefore propose that repetitiveness has a common underlying mechanism within and across speakers and encourage future work aimed at testing this hypothesis across other variables and varieties.","PeriodicalId":46949,"journal":{"name":"Language Variation and Change","volume":"35 1","pages":"107 - 127"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46754610","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Carina Steiner, P. Jeszenszky, Viviane Stebler, A. Leemann
{"title":"Extraverted innovators and conscientious laggards? Investigating effects of personality traits on language change","authors":"Carina Steiner, P. Jeszenszky, Viviane Stebler, A. Leemann","doi":"10.1017/S0954394523000091","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954394523000091","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Although personality-related factors play a crucial role in sociolinguistics as conceivable sources of language variation and change, there is insufficient quantitative evidence on such relationships. Using a large and balanced sample (n = 1000), this study investigated effects of personality traits on the use of a Swiss German plural marker in its early stages of diffusion. Besides age and region, conscientiousness and extraversion emerged as the most important predictors: less conscientious and, to a certain extent, more extraverted speakers were more likely to contribute to the diffusion of the morphological innovations under investigation. Based on our results, we argue that less conscientious speakers might monitor their own speech and that of others less closely, thus adopting innovations earlier, whereas extraverted speakers may act as successful brokers in transmitting innovations from one social group to another.","PeriodicalId":46949,"journal":{"name":"Language Variation and Change","volume":"35 1","pages":"1 - 28"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43411568","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Agreeing when to disagree: A corpus analysis of variable agreement in caregiver and child English","authors":"Cynthia Lukyanenko, Karen Miller","doi":"10.1017/S0954394523000054","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954394523000054","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract We characterized the patterns of agreement variation and consistency in three corpora of child and child-directed US English to better understand preschoolers’ input and to compare preschoolers’ own agreement production. We examined sentences with third-person subjects and tensed forms of be in two large single-family corpora and one cross-sectional corpus collected during a Search-and-Find activity. Caregivers’ agreement variation consistently reflected patterns previously found in adult-to-adult speech. Children's variation was conditioned by many of the same factors (e.g., sentence type, pronoun subject, and order of subject and verb) and clearly demonstrated acquisition of the categorical-variable split. However, some children showed substantially higher rates of nonagreeing forms (There's the cherries) than their caregivers and differed in their ranking of conditioning factors. We suggest that this reflects children's developing production processing abilities: shorter sentence-planning spans may make nonagreement a useful strategy for avoiding early number commitments in verb-first sentences.","PeriodicalId":46949,"journal":{"name":"Language Variation and Change","volume":"35 1","pages":"29 - 54"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42122579","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"goose-fronting in Received Pronunciation across time: A trend study","authors":"Sandra Jansen, Jose A. Mompeán","doi":"10.1017/S0954394523000017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954394523000017","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The current study analyzes the trajectory of the goose vowel in Received Pronunciation (RP) over ten decades (1920s-2010s). Recordings of eighty-seven RP speakers were transcribed in ELAN, and vowel tokens were extracted by FAVE, measuring F1 and F2 values at the midpoint. Showing the life-cycle of a sound change from start to (almost) completion, the results confirm that goose-fronting has been an active sound change for many decades in RP, with F2 starting to increase in the middle of the twentieth century and accelerated changes in the 1970s and the 2010s. We observe similar predictor strengths of linguistic factors as in previous studies. The results are interpreted in light of the social changes in the social composition of the RP group in the second part of the twentieth century, involving increased dialect contact.","PeriodicalId":46949,"journal":{"name":"Language Variation and Change","volume":"35 1","pages":"55 - 77"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42135564","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}