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

博士论文研究：调查所研究语言的声音变化：年龄和地点效应的社会语音学研究

• 批准号: 2214689
• 负责人: Charles Chang
• 金额: $ 1.68万
• 依托单位: Trustees of Boston University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2022-08-15 至 2024-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2214689&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Investigating; Sound

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.

语言的变化是一个生活的事实，而在各种音变类型中，元音合并在语言学研究中的地位尤为突出。大多数关于元音合并的研究都集中在印欧语系的语言上，例如英语，解决了与曾经不同的元音的产生和/或感知有关的问题，这些元音变得不那么明显（例如，许多美国英语的使用者不再区分“cot”和“caught”元音，但其中一些使用者仍然可以感知到这种区别）。然而，在研究较少的非印欧语言中，研究元音合并的动态对于理解元音合并是很重要的，因为它们通常包含元音特征，这些特征在研究充分的语言中是不存在的，因此，为元音如何随着时间的推移而变化提供了新的见解。使用混合方法的方法，这个项目探讨了元音合并的情况下观察到的一个未充分研究的语言，其中包含一个元音功能缺乏印欧语言。该项目的研究结果有助于科学知识的语言变化，接触，并在一个多语言的，未充分研究的社会变化，语言变化的模式之间的关系和社会和态度协会的讲话，并确定元音合并的基础上，在语言中具有独特的元音功能。通过收集不同年龄和地区的说话者的语音产生和感知数据，该项目也对语音语言病理学、语言教学学、语音识别技术和法医语言学产生了影响。该项目探讨了先前元音合并案例中涉及的变异模式，但重点关注了一个罕见的元音合并案例。特别是，该项目研究人口和社会因素，如年龄，性别和地方，是否有助于预测合并的程度，在这种情况下，一个元音合并在生产中是否对应于一个在感知，以及是否元音合并，这是明显的根据传统的元音高度和元音backness尺寸也出现在其他一致，不太频繁检查声学措施。该项目通过收集来自两个不同社区（城市和农村）的生产和感知数据来解决这些问题，包括青少年（10-18岁），年轻人（19-39岁）和老年人（40岁以上）。生产数据来自会话访谈和图片命名任务;感知数据来自听力任务。来自生产任务的音频记录进行声学分析，这有助于确定生产中是否存在元音合并，并支持探索元音合并的附加诊断。研究参与者还完成了一份详细的问卷，其中包括有关语言/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，是语言研究人员的工具，也是关于正在研究的语言中各种言语规范的信息来源。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估来支持。