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.

语言的变化是不可避免的事实，在各种类型的声音变化中，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经过深入研究的印欧语言，例如英语，解决与曾经明显的元音的产生和/或感知相关的问题，这些元音现在变得越来越不明显（例如，许多说美国英语的人不再产生“cot”和“caught”元音之间的区别，但其中一些说话者仍然可以感知到这种区别）。然而，研究较少研究的非印欧语系语言中元音合并的动态对于理解元音合并很重要，因为它们通常包含经过充分研究的语言所缺乏的元音特征，因此提供了关于如何进行元音合并的新见解。元音会随着时间而改变。该项目采用混合方法，研究了在一种尚未研究的语言中观察到的元音合并案例，该语言包含印欧语言中不存在的元音特征。该项目的研究结果有助于对多语言、研究不足的社会中的语言变异、接触和变化、语言变异模式与言语的社会和态度关联之间的关系、以及识别元音合并的基础的科学认识。具有独特元音特征的语言。通过收集不同说话者年龄和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、语音识别技术和法医语言学产生影响。该项目探讨了先前的研究中涉及的变异模式。元音合并的案例，但重点关注更罕见的元音合并的案例。该项目特别研究了年龄、性别和地点等人口和社会因素是否有助于预测本案例中的合并程度；产生中的元音合并是否与感知中的元音合并相对应；以及根据传统元音高度和元音后向维度明显的元音合并是否也一致地出现在其他不常检查的声学测量中。该项目通过收集两个不同社区（城市与农村）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）。生产数据来自对话访谈和图片命名任务；感知数据来自聆听任务。来自生产任务的音频录音经过声学分析，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调查问卷，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正在研究的语言的第一个开放获取语料库的基础，它是语言研究人员的工具，也是有关正在研究的语言的各种语音规范的信息来源。该奖项反映了 NSF 的法定使命，并被视为值得通过使用基金会的智力优点和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估来支持。