accent changes

Being in this class has definitely changed the way I listen to and think about speech. When I meet someone, I try to identify their accent and notice unusual characteristics of their speech. I have become very attune to regional vocabulary (soda/pop/coke type things) and to pronunciation of vowels. I've begun to listen closely whenever people say "pin" or "pen" to see if they've merged and to comment on pronunciations of "orange."

Being at Stanford, there is a wealth of accents for me to hear. International or within the US, there are countless dialects represented here. It has been interesting to hear how everyone adjusts their vocabulary and pronunciation after living with such diverse influences. Several of my international friends complain that they are beginning to sound like Americans. Although I haven't picked up on the change, their friends and family back home can hear it every time they talk on the phone. I have also noticed American speakers who have changed. Many of them have picked up new expressions from roommates or classmates, and nearly all of them have gotten better at understanding formerly unfamiliar accents.

As for myself, I haven't noticed any great changes, except for the use of Stanford abbreviations and acronyms. I still don't use "hella" (thank goodness), and I don't think my pronunciation is very different than in September. I am interested, however, to see if my family notice any changes when I am back for Christmas break. Maybe they will hear differences that I can't.

sound, syntax, vocabulary, take 2

I've just gone back to look at my original post on this topic, and I was surprised to note that I agree with most of the thoughts I had at the beginning of this class. I still feel that sound is most important for language comprehension and that context alleviates the problems caused by vocabulary differences. For instance, in the "Ebb Tide for Hoi Toide" article this week, there were a number of words I could not guess the meaning of, but I think if I had a conversation with someone from Orcacoke, we would be able to understand each other. (On a side note, the word "catawampus" is actually used in my family even though we have no ties to North Carolina or the brogue) The Orcacoke brogue also uses a different syntax than the dialect I speak, but when examples of this were given, I had no trouble finding the meaning.

One example that comes to mind when I think about the importance of sound in comprehension involves confusion of the word "Peter." Before coming to Stanford, I participated in the SPOT program. At the beginning of the program, of course, we had to do a lot of introductions. One of the participants I met was named "Peter." He had lived in Michigan for several years, but grew up in England. For this reason, he pronounced his own name as "Pete-ah" (dropped the 'r'). Since Peter is a common name, I expected that other people would be able to understand his introduction, but in fact, he had a lot of problems. Often, I would have to step in to pronounce his name in the more typical American way in order for the other person to understand. 

lexical differences

I thought the article from Language Learning this week was really interesting. As I read through the three hypotheses, they seemed very logical to me, so I was surprised when two of them were not upheld by the testing. Particularly, I thought it was interesting that foreign listeners scored better when listening to Southern English than Australian English. I would have guessed the other way around! 

On to lexical differences, though....

Since I have been using the notebook to record misunderstandings, most have them have been due to pronunciation. I have, however, experienced some confusion related to lexical differences. For instance, a Northern-California speaker was confused when I used the word "cook out" to describe what she would call a "barbeque." We were able to quickly resolve the difference, however. I have also experienced confusion when a native Spanish speaker used the word "molested" to mean "annoyed" (the Spanish verb for "to annoy" is "molestar"). Since he was talking about a girl looking "molested" because of something a boy was doing, my interpretation was much different than what he intended. We resolved the confusion by clarifying in Spanish. 

These lexical differences caused problems for different reasons. In the first case, the issue was regional differences in vocabulary. In the second, it was misuse of a word in a second language. For me, the first case has come up far more often than the second, probably because I spend more time around native speakers than non-native speakers. 

dialect perception paper

I found this paper very interesting and accessible overall. Except for some statistical terms that were above my head, I was able to follow along fairly easily. I thought the research question was appropriate for us since we've talked a lot about it in class. Just the other day, we had an extended discussion about whether being exposed to a variety of accents sensitized or desensitized people. The results from the article suggest that such exposure is sensitizing, which is what I would have guessed. I would love to see if this applies to guessing racial/ethnic background from recorded speech as well.  

One result that I found interesting was that New England was selected less than other regions. Also, the Mid-Atlantic region was usually mis-categorized as New England. This suggested to me that New England and Mid-Atlantic were hard to distinguish between. This made a lot of sense to me, since I find them to be similar. I think the categorization might have been more accurate if the New England and Mid-Atlantic regions were merged. Although I know there are distinctions between the two, I think the distinctions are hard for outsiders to hear. I think it is just as logical for the New England and Mid-Atlantic regions to be merged as for the entirety of the West to be lumped together.