Dynamic Vowel Qualities Among Multiethnic Santa Clara County Talkers
Publication Date
1-9-2021
Document Type
Presentation
Publication Title
Linguistic Society of America (LSA) 2021 Virtual Annual Meeting
Conference Location
Virtual
Abstract
This study considers speech in highly diverse, Santa Clara County, CA, asking whether any innovative phonetic features distinguish these multiethnic young adults from older, predominantly White, Western talkers from the TIMIT corpus (Garofolo et al., 1993). We investigate vowel qualities, focusing on monophthongal /eɪ/ and /oʊ/. Santa Clara County talkers have lowered and backed front vowels consistent with supra-local sound changes, and they produce more monophthongal /eɪ/ than the TIMIT speakers. Monophthongal /eɪ/ is distributed across our subject group, salient among speakers identifying as Indian, Vietnamese, and Mexican. Our analysis considers inter-individual variation and social motivations for its use.
Department
Linguistics and Language Development
Recommended Citation
Julia Swan, Hahn Koo, and Reiko Kataoka. "Dynamic Vowel Qualities Among Multiethnic Santa Clara County Talkers" Linguistic Society of America (LSA) 2021 Virtual Annual Meeting (2021).
