Doctoral Dissertation Research: Investigating Sound Change in an Understudied Language: A Sociophonetic Study of Age and Locality Effects

语言变化是生活中不可避免的事实，在各种类型的语音变化中，元音合并在语言学研究中占有尤为突出的地位。大多数关于元音合并的研究都集中在研究得很好的印欧语言上，比如英语，解决与曾经明显的元音的产生和/或感知相关的问题，这些元音变得不那么明显了（例如，许多说美式英语的人不再区分“cot”和“caught”元音，但其中一些人仍然可以感知到这种区别）。然而，在研究较少的语言和非印欧语言中研究元音合并的动态对于理解元音合并很重要，因为它们通常包含在研究得很好的语言中所缺乏的元音特征，因此，为元音如何随时间变化提供了新的见解。使用混合方法的方法，本项目研究了在一种未被充分研究的语言中观察到的元音合并的情况，该语言包含印欧语言中缺乏的元音特征。该项目的研究结果有助于科学地了解多语言、未被充分研究的社会中的语言变异、接触和变化，以及语言变异模式与言语的社会和态度关联之间的关系，并为识别具有独特元音特征的语言中的元音合并奠定基础。通过收集不同年龄段和不同地区的语音产生和感知数据，该项目还对语音语言病理学、语言教育学、语音识别技术和司法语言学产生影响。这个项目探讨的变化模式，已经涉及到以前的元音合并的情况下，但重点是元音合并的一个罕见的情况。该项目特别审查了人口和社会因素，如年龄、性别和地点，是否有助于预测这种情况下的合并程度；发音上的元音合并是否与感知上的元音合并相对应；根据传统的元音高度和元音后向尺寸，元音合并是否也在其他不太经常检查的声学测量中一致出现。该项目通过收集来自两个不同社区（城市和农村）的生产和认知数据来解决这些问题，这些社区包括青少年（10-18岁）、年轻人（19-39岁）和老年人（40岁以上）。生产数据来自对话式访谈和图片命名任务；感知数据来自于听力任务。来自生产任务的音频记录经过声学分析，这有助于确定生产过程中是否存在元音合并，并支持探索元音合并的其他诊断。研究参与者还完成了一份详细的问卷，其中包括关于语言/方言接触和语言态度的问题。该项目的成果构成了第一个正在研究的语言的开放获取语料库的基础，这是语言研究人员的工具，也是关于未被研究语言的各种语音规范的信息来源。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Language change is a fact of life, and among the various types of sound change, vowel merger has featured particularly prominently in linguistic research. Most research on vowel merger has focused on well-studied Indo-European languages such as English, addressing questions related to the production and/or perception of once-distinct vowels that are becoming less distinct (for example, many speakers of US English no longer produce a distinction between the 'cot' and 'caught' vowels, but some of these speakers can nevertheless perceive the distinction). However, investigating the dynamics of vowel merger in less-studied, and non-Indo-European, languages is important to understanding vowel merger because they often contain vowel features that are absent from well-studied languages and, thus, provide new insights into how vowels can change over time. Using a mixed-methods approach, this project examines a case of vowel merger observed in an under-studied language, which contains a vowel feature absent from Indo-European languages. The findings of the project contribute to scientific knowledge of language variation, contact, and change in a multilingual, understudied society, of the relationship between patterns of language variation and the social and attitudinal associations of speech, and of the basis for identifying vowel mergers in languages with unique vowel features. By collecting speech production and perception data across a range of speaker ages and localities, the project also has implications for speech-language pathology, language pedagogy, speech recognition technologies, and forensic linguistics.This project explores patterns of variation that have been implicated in previous cases of vowel merger but focusing on a rarer case of vowel merger. In particular, the project examines whether demographic and social factors, such as age, gender, and locality, help predict the extent of merger in this case; whether a vowel merger in production corresponds to one in perception; and whether a vowel merger that is apparent according to the traditional vowel height and vowel backness dimensions also appears consistently in other, less frequently examined acoustic measures. The project addresses these questions by collecting production and perception data from two different communities (urban versus rural), including adolescents (ages 10-18 years), younger adults (19-39 years), and older adults (40+ years). Production data come from conversational interviews and a picture-naming task; perception data come from a listening task. Audio recordings from the production tasks undergo acoustic analyses, which help determine whether there is a vowel merger in production and support exploration of additional diagnostics for vowel merger. Study participants also complete a detailed questionnaire that includes questions about language/dialect contact and language attitudes. The project results form the basis of the first open-access corpus of the language being studied, a tool for language researchers and a source of information about various speech norms in an under-studied language.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.