Normalization of nonlinearly time-dynamic vowels.

This study compares 16 vowel-normalization methods for purposes of sociophonetic research. Most of the previous work in this domain has focused on the performance of normalization methods on steady-state vowels. By contrast, this study explicitly considers dynamic formant trajectories, using generalized additive models to model these nonlinearly. Normalization methods were compared using a hand-corrected dataset from the Flemish-Dutch Teacher Corpus, which contains 160 speakers from 8 geographical regions, who spoke regionally accented versions of Netherlandic/Flemish Standard Dutch. Normalization performance was assessed by comparing the methods' abilities to remove anatomical variation, retain vowel distinctions, and explain variation in the normalized F0-F3. In addition, it was established whether normalization competes with by-speaker random effects or supplements it, by comparing how much between-speaker variance remained to be apportioned to random effects after normalization. The results partly reproduce the good performance of Lobanov, Gerstman, and Nearey 1 found earlier and generally favor log-mean and centroid methods. However, newer methods achieve higher effect sizes (i.e., explain more variance) at only marginally worse performances. Random effects were found to be equally useful before and after normalization, showing that they complement it. The findings are interpreted in light of the way that the different methods handle formant dynamics.

Using Twitter Data for the Study of Language Change in Low-Resource Languages. A Panel Study of Relative Pronouns in Frisian.

This paper investigates the usability of Twitter as a resource for the study of language change in progress in low-resource languages. It is a panel study of a vigorous change in progress, the loss of final t in four relative pronouns (dy't, dêr't, wêr't, wa't) in Frisian, a language spoken by ± 450,000 speakers in the north-west of the Netherlands. This paper deals with the issues encountered in retrieving and analyzing tweets in low-resource languages, in the analysis of low-frequency variables, and in gathering background information on Twitterers. In this panel study we were able to identify and track 159 individual Twitterers, whose Frisian (and Dutch) tweets posted in the era 2010-2019 were collected. Nevertheless, a solid analysis of the sociolinguistic factors in this language change in progress was hampered by unequal age distributions among the Twitterers, the fact that the youngest birth cohorts have given up Twitter almost completely after 2014 and that the variables have a low frequency and are unequally spread over Twitterers.

Verbal Working Memory Is Related to the Acquisition of Cross-Linguistic Phonological Regularities.

Closely related languages share cross-linguistic phonological regularities, such as Frisian -âld [Í»:t] and Dutch -oud [ʱut], as in the cognate pairs kâld [kÍ»:t] - koud [kʱut] 'cold' and wâld [wÍ»:t] - woud [wʱut] 'forest'. Within Bybee's (1995, 2001, 2008, 2010) network model, these regularities are, just like grammatical rules within a language, generalizations that emerge from schemas of phonologically and semantically related words. Previous research has shown that verbal working memory is related to the acquisition of grammar, but not vocabulary. This suggests that verbal working memory supports the acquisition of linguistic regularities. In order to test this hypothesis we investigated whether verbal working memory is also related to the acquisition of cross-linguistic phonological regularities. For three consecutive years, 5- to 8-year-old Frisian-Dutch bilingual children (n = 120) were tested annually on verbal working memory and a Frisian receptive vocabulary task that comprised four cognate categories: (1) identical cognates, (2) non-identical cognates that either do or (3) do not exhibit a phonological regularity between Frisian and Dutch, and (4) non-cognates. The results showed that verbal working memory had a significantly stronger effect on cognate category (2) than on the other three cognate categories. This suggests that verbal working memory is related to the acquisition of cross-linguistic phonological regularities. More generally, it confirms the hypothesis that verbal working memory plays a role in the acquisition of linguistic regularities.

Cross-linguistic vowel variation in trilingual speakers of Saterland Frisian, Low German, and High German.

The present study compares the acoustic realization of Saterland Frisian, Low German, and High German vowels by trilingual speakers in the Saterland. The Saterland is a rural municipality in northwestern Germany. It offers the unique opportunity to study trilingualism with languages that differ both by their vowel inventories and by external factors, such as their social status and the autonomy of their speech communities. The objective of the study was to examine whether the trilingual speakers differ in their acoustic realizations of vowel categories shared by the three languages and whether those differences can be interpreted as effects of either the differences in the vowel systems or of external factors. Monophthongs produced in a /hVt/ frame revealed that High German vowels show the most divergent realizations in terms of vowel duration and formant frequencies, whereas Saterland Frisian and Low German vowels show small differences. These findings suggest that vowels of different languages are likely to share the same phonological space when the speech communities largely overlap, as is the case with Saterland Frisian and Low German, but may resist convergence if at least one language is shared with a larger, monolingual speech community, as is the case with High German.

A cross-dialectal acoustic study of Saterland Frisian vowels.

Previous investigations on Saterland Frisian report a large vowel inventory, including up to 20 monophthongs and 16 diphthongs in stressed position. Conducting a cross-dialectal acoustic study on Saterland Frisian vowels in Ramsloh, Scharrel, and Strücklingen, the objective is to provide a phonetic description of vowel category realization and to identify acoustic dimensions which may enhance the discrimination of neighboring categories within the crowded vowel space of the endangered minority language. All vowels were elicited in a /hVt/ frame. Acoustic measurements included vowel duration, mid-vowel F1 and F2, and the amount of spectral change and the spectral rate of change. The results suggest instances of phonetic attrition, i.e., merged categories, precisely where contrasts were reported to be on the retreat. The cross-dialectal comparison showed differences between the three dialects primarily within the F1 dimension at the 20% measurement point. The findings presented here contribute to the description of an endangered minority language and add to the question of which acoustic variables are used in languages with large vowel inventories to maintain or enhance the existing contrasts. Furthermore, the results underline the importance of the consideration of inter-speaker variability as well as measurements beyond the vowel target.

A cognitively grounded measure of pronunciation distance.

In this study we develop pronunciation distances based on naive discriminative learning (NDL). Measures of pronunciation distance are used in several subfields of linguistics, including psycholinguistics, dialectology and typology. In contrast to the commonly used Levenshtein algorithm, NDL is grounded in cognitive theory of competitive reinforcement learning and is able to generate asymmetrical pronunciation distances. In a first study, we validated the NDL-based pronunciation distances by comparing them to a large set of native-likeness ratings given by native American English speakers when presented with accented English speech. In a second study, the NDL-based pronunciation distances were validated on the basis of perceptual dialect distances of Norwegian speakers. Results indicated that the NDL-based pronunciation distances matched perceptual distances reasonably well with correlations ranging between 0.7 and 0.8. While the correlations were comparable to those obtained using the Levenshtein distance, the NDL-based approach is more flexible as it is also able to incorporate acoustic information other than sound segments.

Do surname differences mirror dialect variation?

Our focus in this paper is the analysis of surnames, which have been proven to be reliable genetic markers because in patrilineal systems they are transmitted along generations virtually unchanged, similarly to a genetic locus on the Y chromosome. We compare the distribution of surnames to the distribution of dialect pronunciations, which are clearly culturally transmitted. Because surnames, at the time of their introduction, were words subject to the same linguistic processes that otherwise result in dialect differences, one might expect their geographic distribution to be correlated with dialect pronunciation differences. In this paper we concentrate on the Netherlands, an area of only 40,000 km2, where two official languages are spoken, Dutch and Frisian. We analyze 19,910 different surnames, sampled in 226 locations, and 125 different words, whose pronunciation was recorded in 252 sites. We find that, once the collinear effects of geography on both surname and cultural transmission are taken into account, there is no statistically significant association between the two, suggesting that surnames cannot be taken as a proxy for dialect variation, even though they can be safely used as a proxy for Y-chromosome genetic variation. We find the results historically and geographically insightful, hopefully leading to a deeper understanding of the role that local migrations and cultural diffusion play in surname and dialect diversity.