Narrow transcription, Dialects and Secondlanguage Phonetics

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Narrow transcription,Dialects and
Second-language Phonetics

• HESP 403 November 6 2006

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Dialects and L2 acquisition

• Good times to use diacritics because...?

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Dialects

• Not all people who speak a language speak it the
  same way.
• Not every speaker of a dialect will use all sound
  changes associated with that dialect
• A language can be subdivided into any number of
  dialects which each vary in some way from the
  parent language.
• They are not to be considered disordered or
  wrong
• They are distinguished by functionality and
  normality
• A speaker of a different dialect can still be
  understood by another, and that behavior is not
  abnormal for his class, region or social group.

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Functions of dialects

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Dialectical processes in phonology

• Mergers
• Two different sounds become the same
• Shift
• A sound moves into a different position
• Chain shift
• A sound moves into a different position, pushing
  that sound into another, and into another

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Examples of dialect changes

• Boston lack of r Harvard Square
  Hahvahd Squah
• NYC substitution of t and d for initial ð /
  ?
• look at these things
• South ai (hide) is monophthong a
• /I/ and /e/ before nasals (pin vs. pen)
• Northern Cities
• wh and w (whale vs. wail which vs. witch)

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The Northern Cities shift
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Northern Cities shift

• / ? / ? / a / ball
• / a / ? / æ / top
• / æ / ? / i? / tack

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The Southern Shift
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Southern shift

• / u / ? / i? / blue
• / e / ? / I / pen
• / a / ? / o / spot card

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Cultural / Social dialects

• AAVE
• Omission/substitution of word-final consonant
• that ? ðæ
• bad ? bæt
• Vowels still maintain phonetic properties of
  preceding the following consonant

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Predicting speech of different dialects

• ... Will be good to practice, so that you are
  prepared in the field
• ... but it wont be graded as part of this course.
  
• Be prepared to transcribe speech from any
  dialect, though.
• Youll have to do this in practice!

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Second-Language phoneticsinterference

• English
• Learning features of a second language

• Spanish
• Vowels
• Consonants
• Syllable structure
• Asian
• Liquids
• Syllable structure

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Non-native vowel changes Spanish
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Spanish stop sounds

• Like many non-English languages, Spanish
  voiceless sounds are unaspirated, yielding a
  voiced perception from English listeners.
• Youll notice this in speakers of French, Hindi,
  Russian, Swedish, and Arabic as well.

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Spanish syllable structure

• Spanish does not allow /s/ consonant clusters in
  word-initial position
• Ex step, school, slip, speak
• Spanish speakers habitually add a vowel to the
  onset of such a word so that it obeys the
  syllable structure of their native language.
• More practice with Spanish on page 289 ex 8.8

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Asian use of liquids

• The lateral and rhotic liquids are allophones in
  Japanese, and are thus not perceived as distinct
  sounds.
• Common misperceptions include words like
• Lake/rake rate/late raw/law correct/collect
• Default production is r for both English
  /r/ and /l/.

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Asian syllable structure

• Japanese and Korean do not allow consonant
  clusters in any position.
• When hearing CCs in nonsense speech, they will
  claim to hear a (phantom) vowel
• Ebzo Ebuzo adzo adozo
• Syllables are all open (except some rare cases
  where a syllable ends in n, so final consonants
  are often deleted or followed by an extra vowel

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Cross-language vowel learning

• Comparing English with other languages
• Quality
• Quantity
• Developmental effects

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Vowel systemstopics from the reading

• Quantity vs. Quality in vowels
• The tense/lax problem
• Duration-based vowel features
• Estonian Temporal Compensation
• Finnish duration independence
• Swedish duration opposition

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Allophonic vowel duration

• Swedish learned duration effects
• Contrast with English
• Arabic extrinsic duration independence
• No vowel lengthening before voice in Arabic,
  but they can use this to perceive voicing in
  other languages.

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Practice transcription

• Listen carefully...

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Homework

• Page 305 study questions for chapter 8
  1, 3, 5, 6, 9, 10, 15
• Answer briefly, but with thought.
• QUIZ next week
• Using narrow transcription, identifying
  suprasegmental features and non-native phonetic
  features (conceptually)