I Bag Your Pardon:The Albertan æ/ɛ shift and community grammarsJacqueline Jones & Stephen WintersDepartment of Linguistics, Languages, and Cultures

Introduction

• For some speakers of Canadian English in Alberta, [æ] and [ɛ] have begun to merge before [g]. Similar mergers have been identified in Seattle and the American Midwest (Squizzero, 2009; Zeller, 1997).

• The purpose of the current study is threefold: (1) Describe the extent and direction of the change; (2) Identify speaker traits that may signal propagators and resistors of language change. (Eckert, 1989); (3) Examine the effects of modality of stimulus presentation on listener productions of [æ] and [ɛ] to determine the influence of self grammars and community grammars on the merger.

• Self Grammar refers to the unique internal representation of the sounds of a language an individual holds. It includes their indexical knowledge, perception grammars (Beddor, 2012), and self-productions. The Community Grammar describes a collection of Self Grammars belonging to a particular group. It may be perceived differently, depending on experience.

• Basic task: speakers produce [æ] and [ɛ] in words and non-words, preceding both [g] and other consonants, from prompts in three different modalities.

Methodology

• 18 students at the University of Calgary between the ages of 19 and 26 were recorded. Participant recordings were labeled in Praat (Boersma, 2001).

• Formant values were normalized by speaker (Lobanov, 1971) and euclidean distances in F1/F2/F3 space were calculated between each token and the average F1-F3 values produced for [æ] and [ɛ] in calibration.

jmjone@ucalgary.caswinters@ucalgary.ca

Hypotheses• Speaker Effects: females and speakers with dominant social identities (e.g. “Leaders”) will be

more likely to accommodate to stimuli voices (Pardo 2006), while self-focused speakers (e.g. “Introverts”) will resist external influences.

• Modality Effects:1. Auditory stimuli will induce spontaneous phonetic imitation (SPI) (Goldinger, 1998; Babel,

2014) and the influence of the community grammar.2. Pictorial stimuli activate the self grammar. Productions in this block will most closely represent

a speaker’s baseline vowels.3. Orthographic stimuli represent a “non-community” grammar, or the standard formal

language. They will have a negligible effect on speaker productions.

Results

• Half (9/18) of participants were identified as “Mergers.” T-tests showed no significant differences between their [æ] and [ɛ] formants at the 50% mark of each vowel.

• A significant (p < 0.01) positive correlation exists between speakers who merge [æ] and [ɛ] and places lived. The more widely travelled person, the more likely they are to merge (p < 0.01).

• Modality: vowels were produced closer to those in calibration when pictorial stimuli were presented first.

• All subjects shifted [æ] higher and fronter in the vowel space when preceding [g]. “Mergers” shifted [æ] even higher and fronter in their vowel space than calibration [ɛ].

• All subjects shifted [ɛ] backer and lower in their vowel space when preceding [k]. For all subjects, [æ] before [g] was higher and fronter than [ɛ] before [k]. “For Non-Mergers”, the [æ] – [ɛ] contrast was smaller before both [g] and [k] than before [d].

Conclusions

• The Alberta merger is complete for some individuals, but in-progress for others.

• Exposure to more dialects and changing situations in youth leads to greater tendency to merge.

• The influence of SPI can be reduced by recency effects of one’s self grammar. The effect of the Pictorial stimuli being presented first remains throughout further shifts in stimuli.

• Acoustic information (in auditory stimuli) has a stronger influence on participant vowels than indirect sound symbolism (in orthographic stimuli).

• The influence of the stimuli voice is stronger than the influence of ‘possible word formation’, but only in ambiguous contexts.

Bibliography

Babel, M., McGuire, G., Walters, S., & Nicholls, A. (2014). Novelty and social preference in phonetic accommodation. Laboratory Phonology-Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology 5.1:123-150.

Beddor, Patrice S. (2012). Perception Grammars and Sound Change. The Initiation of Sound Change: Perception, Production, and Social Factors. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 37:55

Boersma, P. (2001). Praat, a system for doing phonetics by computer. Glot International 5:9/10:341-345.

Eckert, P. (1989). Jocks and burnouts: Social categories and identity in the high school. Teachers College Press. New York, New York.

Goldinger, S. (1998). Echoes of echoes? An episodic theory of lexical access. Psychological review 105.2:251.

Labov, William. (2010). What is to be learned? Presented at NELS 41.

Lobanov, B. M. (1971). Classification of Russian vowels spoken by different speakers. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 49(2B):606:608.

Wassink, A. B., Squizzero, R., Scanlon, M., Schirra, R., & Conn, J. (2009). Effects of Style and Gender on Fronting and Raising of/æ/,/e:/and/ε/before/g/in Seattle English. Presented at NWAV 2009.

Zeller, Christine. (1997) The investigation of a sound change in progress:/æ/to/e/in midwestern American English." Journal of English linguistics 25.2:142-155.

• Participants supplied demographic information and aligned themselves on personality binaries (e.g. Leader/Follower).

• Calibration: recordings were made of each speaker producing all Canadian English vowels in the [h_d] and [h_rd] frames.

• Production stimuli were presented in three different modalities: orthographic, auditory, and pictorial. Participants were presented with a stimulus and asked to read, repeat, or identify the object (or nonword) presented.

• Nonwords in the pictorial block were presented as simple equations of <picture> + <picture>, with the participant being asked to combine the two pictures into a new word.

Pictorial Nonword training slide.Orthographic labels were not present in non-training stimuli

• All stimuli in the orthographic and pictorial blocks contained [æg], [ɛg], [æk], or [ɛk]. The auditory block contained additional stimuli with [œg] or [œk].

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Non-Mergers: Average Normalized F1/F2 Values

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