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Scholarly Works, English

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https://hdl.handle.net/10919/24318
Research articles, presentations, and other scholarship

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Browsing Scholarly Works, English by Author "Bissell, Marie"

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    "Dialect B" on the Mississippi: An acoustic study of /aw/ raising patterns in Greater New Orleans, Louisiana
    Bissell, Marie; Carmichael, Katie (Open Library of Humanities, 2022-04-07)
    "Dialect B,"a diphthong raising pattern conditioned by a following obstruent's surface voicing, was first observed by Joos (1942) among Canadian schoolchildren. It has rarely been documented for /ai/ (Berkson, Davis, & Strickler, 2017) and has never been documented for /aw/ in any North American English variety. Phonetic /aw/ raising, which has raised nuclei in words like "out"but not in words like "loud"or "outer,"contrasts with more widely documented phonological /aw/ raising, which has raised nuclei in words like "out"and "outer"but not in words like "loud."In the current study, we examined /aw/ productions from 36 white suburban speakers of Greater New Orleans English, a variety where /aw/ raising before voiceless consonants is a change in progress (Carmichael, 2020b). We classified speakers into three raising patterns: none, phonetic, and phonological. All three raising patterns were present in our data set. This study thus constitutes the first acoustic documentation of a phonetic /aw/ raising pattern produced by a North American English speaker. Additionally, we probe the acoustic implementations of the patterns to analyze phonetic enhancement post-phonologization. These analyses add to descriptions of Greater New Orleans English patterns and build on recent work examining incipient vowel shifts.
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    Regional and individual variation in acoustic targets of /ai/ and /au/ in American English
    Shport, Irina; Bissell, Marie; Berkson, Kelly; Carmichael, Katie (2023-09-01)
    English diphthongs are represented as bisegmental (e.g., /aɪ/) and assumed to have two acoustic targets (onset, offset). These phones are standardly represented with variable symbology (e.g., /ai/, /aj/), and previous work indeed reports variability in diphthong offsets. To investigate whether variation can be explained by dialectal and/or individual differences, we examined diphthongs (/aɪ, aʊ/) produced by 41 speakers of American English from Ohio (Midland, Northern regions) and Louisiana (Southern region). Comparison of offset spectral estimates to nearby monophthongs indicate that the /aɪ/ offset was relatively consistently acoustically close to [ɪ], but the /aʊ/ offset was highly variable for both groups. While some of these findings, such as the degree of dynamic spectral change in diphthongs, can be explained by dialectal differences, it is also possible that the diphthongs have different underlying structure (e.g., more clearly biphasic onset-offset for /aɪ/ than for /aʊ/).