03/14/2014
Here's an abstract for David's upcoming talk at Northern Illinois University (April 3rd, 5:00 pm-Reavis Hall 202)
Time Travel Without a Time Machine? Indeed!: Some Observations from the Instrumental Reanalysis of Late 19th and Early 20th Century US English Vowel Variation
David Durian
Durian Linguistics Lab and College of DuPage
In this presentation, patterns of vowel change observed in the speech of speakers born in the US during a variety of time periods between roughly 1845 and 1990 will be discussed and analyzed. The data for the analysis comes from audio-recorded speech samples drawn from speakers recorded for a variety of projects between 1933 and 2010 and analyzed in recent years via a series of projects currently underway at the Durian Linguistics Laboratory. Data are drawn from speakers born throughout this time period living in 3 locales--Chicago, IL; Columbus, OH; and New England. Given the time depth of the data, we are able to observe a number of sound changes in progress, both in real and apparent time. Dr. David Durian, principal researcher at the Durian Lab, will lead a discussion of the results of the Lab's analyses of these patterns of language change and vowel variation.
During this presentation, Dr. Durian will discuss patterns of vowel variation observed in the data. Particular emphasis will be placed on the analysis, and in some cases, reanalysis of patterns of vowel variation found among speakers born in the 19th and early 20th Century in the data as compared to patterns found for speakers of similar vintage in earlier studies. These will be illustrated via playback of audio recordings of the patterns in the original speaker data. As well, normalized vowel plots of speaker vowel systems will be presented, to allow a visual appreciation of the patterns of variation to be obtained. In addition, some discussion will be provided of how the patterns of vowel variation observed were analyzed, using the free acoustic analysis software Praat and also the statistical analysis program R.
