This weekend, I attended the 52nd New Ways of Analyzing Variation conference in Miami Beach, Florida. See below for summaries and files from my two presentations.
Friday’s presentation on prelaterals in Georgia English
Download the slides here!
My research team, including Jon Forrest, Peggy Renwick, and Lelia Glass, presented yet again at NWAV with our talk called “Natural Class Reorganization over Apparent Time by Prelateral /u/ and /oʊ/ in Georgia.” We focused on prelateral vowels and how they’ve changed over time. Focusing just on /ul/ and /ol/, what we’re calling
Saturday’s presentation on /ls/ and /lθ/ closure durations
Download the slides here!
Hallie Davidson is working with me on our project called, “Social Meaning of Closure Duration in the Affrication of /ls/ and /lθ/ in Utah English.” In some previous work, I noticed that some people in Utah have closures in /lθ/ clusters as in health, filth, or wealth and that there might be some correlations between longer closures and membership in some social groups. Hallie is testing that specifically by setting up a matched-guise test and seeing if people respond differently to longer durations. This is a “Project Launch” poster, so we welcome any feedback on what questions to ask or how to ensure that our recordings are as natural as possible. We suspect that longer closures will index some social meaning among Utahns. If we do find that, this might be the first time that that particular acoustic cue—closure durations—have shown to be socially meaningful in a language that doesn’t have geminate stops!