Lifespans and Styles

Editorial

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Welcome to the second issue of Volume 7 of Lifespans & Styles: Undergraduate Papers in Sociolinguistics. This issue includes five papers that continue the journal’s mission of showcasing excellence in undergraduate research in sociolinguistics. This issue’s papers are thematically similar to one another in very interesting ways – more so than any set of paper published in any previous issue. The first two focus on language and race, racism, and African American English; the other three are all about lifespan change and second language/dialect acquisition.

Attitudinal Judgments of Dialect Traits and Colorism in African Americans

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This study demonstrates how language and complexion influence professional and social perceptions of African Americans. This study contains an online verbal-guise survey where participants either saw a photo of a lighter skin-toned African-American male and female or an electronically darkened version. Audio was attached to each photo, which contains traits of African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) in the case of the male and Standard American English for the female. The results suggest African-American females are more likely to experience colorism in professional traits while African-American males are more likely to experience colorism in social traits. Additionally, the respondent’s race influences perceptions of AAVE.

"We Pray for Our Nation an(d) Our Worl(d)"

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This paper examines the effect of race, context, and white public space on the extent to which speakers articulate, hyperarticulate, hypo-articulate, or glottalize word-final English alveolar stops -/t/ and -/d/ in the controlled environment of the quadrennial US Presidential Inaugural Prayer. It shows that African-American speakers hyperarticulated and articulated /t,d/ more frequently than the white speaker, who hypo-articulated and glottalized /t,d/ consistently, especially on words like God, Lord, and Christ. These results suggest that the highly formal context required African-American speakers to perform /t,d/ to index themselves as authorities to an unfamiliar, white audience, while the white speaker did not consider race to influence listeners’ judgements of him, allowing him to index familiarity and trustworthiness.

De LaurentESE

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An increasing amount of sociolinguistic research has been concentrated on diachronic idiolect change: the change of an individual’s dialect over time. This paper adds to this growing topic by analyzing the English idiolect change of Giada De Laurentiis, a heritage speaker of Italian. The study analyzes De Laurentiis’ LOT, START, and GOAT vowels, as well as the voice onset time (VOT) of voiceless stops [k] and [p] by measuring the utterances of the code-switched word ‘mascarpone’ across 20 seasons on television. The data reflect the influence of L2 US English (rhoticity, diphthongization, lengthened VOTs) on heritage Italian in De Laurentiis’ idiolect.

Regional Relocation and Phonetic Dialect Markers

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This paper tracks phonological change in the (ING) morpheme in two YouTube personalities over time. Both participants relocated to a different dialect region than their hometowns over the course of their careers, motivating the hypothesis of this paper: geographic relocation is a catalyst for adult accent change. With a longitudinal study method, I selected audio clips from different periods in each YouTuber’s life and collected formant measurements of the targeted words. Based on a Pearson’s correlation analysis and hypothesis testing models, the participants showed statistically significant progression in their speech over time. Additionally, the speakers exhibited audible shifts most likely as an effect of aging. It is inconclusive whether this study’s observations are influenced by the difference in dialect or societal pressures of the relocated locations without further research in the other variables of each regional dialect.

Food for /θɔt/ or /θɑt/?

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The English low back vowel merger, where words like caught and cot are pronounced identically, is a well-studied phenomenon. Generally, these studies focus on mergers within given regions, comparing vowels of non-mobile individuals. My research differs in exploring the effects of relocation. I examine pronunciation differences of vowels in differently gendered twins from England who moved to Canada as children. Despite growing up in similar environments, their vowel patterns differ: there is some evidence of merger in the female’s but not the male’s vowels. This suggests that mobility and exposure to a new dialect may affect pronunciation changes but are not the sole factors.