Selected Papers from NWAV 51

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30
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2
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2024
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Subject: Adult and Continuing Education ×

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  • Publication
    Visible Articulatory Variation Cueing Sound Change: Lip Rounding and Lip Protrusion Variability in the Mandarin Sibilant Merger
    (2024-10) Du, Baichen; Pfiffner, Alexandra; Johnson, Keith
    Phonological contrasts in speech production and perception are frequently studied with acoustic and/or auditory cues. Less is known about how visual cues are incorporated in a contrast, and how these cues are affected by an acoustic merger-in-progress, especially for changes that can be initiated by different articulatory gestures. This paper investigates the acoustic and visual cues in the ongoing Mandarin sibilant merger, where retroflexes are merging with alveolars. We analyzed audiovisual production data using Computer Vision articulography and found that speakers range from having an almost complete visual merger to a complete visual distinction. The direction of the visual cue merger was also consistent with the direction of the acoustic merger. Further, visual cues were found to be correlated with acoustic cues and strongly predicted spectral moments. We extend previous findings of cue weighting to a shared domain of audio and visual cues, and we discuss implications for the directionality of sound change.
  • Publication
    Investigating Accommodation and Endonormativity: TH/DH-stopping and postvocalic /r/ in Malaysian English
    (2024-10) Chan, Le Xuan
    This exploratory study examines the endornormative stability of Malaysian English features through the lens of accommodation in natural speech. This paper reports data from L1 Malaysian English and compares rates of TH/DH-stopping and postvocalic rhoticity between a baseline task with an in-group L1 Malaysian English experimenter, and an critical condition task with an out-group L1 Canadian English experimenter. The results show that postvocalic rhoticity undergoes convergence and towards the exonormative standard, while TH/DH-stopping is maintained between both tasks. In addition, evidence from both the baseline and critical tasks indicate that TH/DH-stopping are regular features used almost categorically by all speakers, while postvocalic rhoticity is more variable both between speakers and within speakers. Drawing from previous evidence of norm orientation as a factor of accommodation and convergence, I argue that maintenance of TH/DH-stopping is indicative of its status as a stabilized, endonormative feature of MalE, while convergence of postvocalic rhoticity towards an exonormative standard points towards ongoing sound changes in Malaysian English from a non-rhotic standard to a rhotic or more mixed variety.