Your browser does not support the PubReader view.
Go to this page to see a list of supporting browsers.
The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics
[ Article ]
Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 21, No. 0, pp.936-948
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online)
Print publication date 31 Jan 2021
Received 23 Aug 2021 Revised 23 Sep 2021 Accepted 28 Sep 2021
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.21..202109.936

A Quantitative Study of Philadelphia /æ/-tensing

Shinsook Lee ; Mi-Hui Cho
(1st author) Professor, Dept. of English Language Education, Korea University, Tel: 02-3290-2352 leesseng@korea.ac.kr
(corresponding author) Professor, Department of English Language and Literature Kyonggi University Suwon, Korea, Tel: 031-249-9135 mcho@kyonggi.ac.kr


© 2021 KASELL All rights reserved
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

The study aims to provide acoustic evidence of Philadelphia /æ/-tensing based on the data collected in fast colloquial speech from 13 native speakers of English residing in Philadelphia. Specifically, the study compares word pairs that contain tense [ ] in a closed syllable and non-tense [æ] in an open syllable before a nasal and a voiceless fricative consonant (e.g., plant vs. planet, pass vs. passive) to investigate /æ/-tensing in terms of the F1, F2, and duration dimensions in fast colloquial speech. The results show that the properties of the conditioning coda consonant (i.e., nasal stops vs. voiceless fricatives) have a great impact on the realizations of /æ/-tensing; tense [ ] in the pre-nasal words was significantly different from non-tense [æ] mainly in F1, while tense [ ] in the pre-oral words was significantly different from non-tense [æ] only in vowel duration. Thus, the results indicate that the realizations of /æ/-tensing in Philadelphia are not manifested in a uniform way across the acoustic measures of F1, F2, and vowel duration. Moreover, pre-nasal words were significantly different from pre-oral words in terms of the F1 and F2 dimensions but not the vowel duration measure. The results also show that /æ/-tensing varied according to the lexical items investigated. Further, participants’ age affected /æ/-tensing in that older people tended to have lower F2 but show a greater F2 difference between tense [ ] and non-tense [æ] than younger people, which seems to suggest that F2 is more closely related to a social factor of age.

Keywords:

Philadelphia /æ/-tensing, conditioning coda consonants (nasals vs. voiceless fricatives), acoustic dimensions (F1, F2, vowel duration), lexical variation, age effect

References

  • Algeo, J. 2010. The Origins and Development of the English Language (6th ed.). Wadsworth.
  • Beddor, P. S. 1982. Phonological and Phonemic Effects of Nasalization on Vowel Height. Doctoral dissertation, University of Minnesota.
  • Benua, L. 1995. Identity effects in morphological truncation. In J. N. Beckman, L.W. Dickey and S. Urbanczyk, eds., Papers in Optimality Theory, 77-136. Amherst, MA: GLSA (Graduate Linguistic Student Association), Dept. of Linguistics, University of Massachusetts.
  • Benua, L. 1997. Transderivational Identity: Phonological Relations Between Words. Doctoral dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
  • Boersma, P. and D. Weenink. 2015. Praat: Doing Phonetics by Computer (Version 5.4.09). http://www.praat.org/, .
  • Chen, M. Y. 1997. Acoustic correlates of English and French nasal vowels. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 102(4), 2360-70. [https://doi.org/10.1121/1.419620]
  • Decker, P. and J. Nycz. 2012. Are tense [æ]s really tense?: The mapping between articulation and acoustics. Lingua 122, 810–821. [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2012.01.003]
  • Dunlap, E. R. 1987. English [æ] tensing in lexical phonology. Ms., University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
  • Fant, G. 1966. A note on vocal tract size factors and non-uniform F-pattern scaling. Speech Transmission Laboratory, Quarterly Progress and Status Report 7, 22-30.
  • Hillenbrand, J., G. Laura, M. Clark and K. Wheeler. 1995. Acoustic characteristics of American English vowels. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 97(5), 3099-111. [https://doi.org/10.1121/1.411872]
  • House, A. S. and K. N. Stevens. 1956. Analog studies of the nasalization of vowels. Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorders 21, 218-232. [https://doi.org/10.1044/jshd.2102.218]
  • Kahn, D. 1976. Syllable-based Generalizations in English Phonology. Garland, New York.
  • Labov, W. 1981. Resolving the neogrammarian controversy. Language 57, 267-308. [https://doi.org/10.2307/413692]
  • Labov, W. 1989. The exact description of the speech community: Short a in Philadelphia. In R. Fasold and D. Schiffrin, eds., Language Change and Variation, 1–57. John Benjamins. [https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.52.02lab]
  • Labov, W. 2001. Principles of Linguistic Change: Social Factors. Wiley-Blackwell.
  • Labov, W. 2007. Transmission and diffusion. Language 83, 344–387. [https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2007.0082]
  • Labov, W., S. Ash and C. Boberg. 2006. The Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology, and Sound Change: A Multimedia Reference Tool. Walter de Gruyter. [https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110167467]
  • Labov, W., S. Fisher, D. Gylfadottir, A. Henderson and B. Sneller. 2016. Competing systems in Philadelphia phonology. Language Variation and Change 28, 273-305. [https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954394516000132]
  • Ladefoged, P. 2006. A Course in Phonetics (6th ed.). Thomson.
  • Lindblom, B. 1983. Economy of speech gestures. In P. MacNeilage, ed., The Production of Speech, 217–246. Springer, New York. [https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-8202-7_10]
  • Morén B. 1997. Markedness and faithfulness constraints on the association of moras: The dependency between vowel length and consonant weight. Ms., University of Maryland, College Park.
  • Nie, Y. 2017. Phonetic enhancement and three patterns of English a-tensing. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 23, 180-190.
  • R Core Team. 2019. R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing. http://www.R-project.org/
  • Stevens, K., 1989. On the quantal nature of speech. Journal of Phonetics 17, 3–45. [https://doi.org/10.1016/S0095-4470(19)31520-7]
  • Watson, C. I. and J. Harrington. 1999. Acoustic evidence for dynamic formant trajectories in Australian English vowels. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 106, 458–468. [https://doi.org/10.1121/1.427069]
  • Wolfram, W. and R. Johnson. 1982. Phonological Analysis: Focus on American English. Prentice Hall Regents.
  • Wright, J. T. 1975. Effects of vowel nasalization on the perception of vowel height. In C.A. Ferguson, L. M. Hyman and J. J. Ohala, eds., Nasalfest Papers from a Symposium on Nasals and Nasalization, 373-388. Stanford, California: Language Universals Project, Department of Linguistics, Stanford University.
  • Yavaş, M. 2005. Applied English Phonology. Wiley-Blackwell.