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1. New speakers and language change in Diné Bizaad (Navajo)

   https://doi.org/10.1177/13670069221110400  

   Palakurthy, Kayla ( August 2022 , International Journal of Bilingualism)

   This paper analyzes the extent to which new speakers are participating in an ongoing phonological change in Diné Bizaad (Navajo). The implications of these patterns are discussed as they relate to theories of new speakers and language change.

   I apply a variationist methodology to analyze the pronunciation of lateral affricates from speakers representing different generations and language learning contexts. I focus on comparing new speakers, who report acquiring the language primarily through school or in a language program, with their age-equivalent peers.

   The data come from interviews recorded with 51 bilingual Diné Bizaad-English participants, ages 18–75. This includes four new speakers. The analysis focuses on variation in the lateral affricates in connected speech samples and an oral translation task.

   Results reveal that new speakers diverge from other younger participants in their lack of participation in an ongoing change in the affricates. Instead, new speakers more closely resemble middle-aged and older speakers.

   This study applies the new speaker framework to an Indigenous North American language, an under-represented sociolinguistic context within the literature. These findings provide a counterexample to the more frequent finding of new speakers linguistically diverging from older, traditional speakers.

   These results are interpreted as arising due to literacy practices, language usage networks, and community values. The orthographic representation of the affricates is thought to inhibit sound change. At the same time, due to their more formal language learning background, new speakers have developed a self-monitored speech style oriented toward the prestigious, older speakers. A lack of peer group language usage is thought to prevent the development of linguistically or ideologically distinct new speaker varieties. The confluence of these factors means that instead of constituting agents of language change, new speakers are more similar to older participants.

    

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2. Sociolinguistics and language shift: toward understanding the processes of shift through the prism of speakers

   https://doi.org/10.37892/2713-2951  

   Lenore Grenoble ( January 2021 , Sociolingvistika)

   The study of language shift, the replacement of one language by another in a community, or subgroup of a speech community, is a prime topic for sociolinguistic analysis: shift is almost always the result of social factors. This paper argues for focusing research on the study of shift in process and, to that end, studying the different kinds of speakers in shifting communities. The prevalent response to massive, global language shift by linguists is language documentation. Although the need for documentation is clear, there have been inadvertent consequences: valorizing last speakers, promoting linguistic purism, and devaluing L2 language learners who, in many communities, represent the future of the language. The urgency of documenting and describing languages with relatively small numbers of elderly speakers has led the linguistic community to focus almost exclusively on such groups and ignore both larger speech communities in earlier stages of shift, and overlook the wide range of speaker types in shift communities. From a social standpoint, the result is that we are often failing to do the language work in precisely those communities where reversing language shift is still relatively easy. From a scientific standpoint, we are missing the opportunity to study language change in process, and missing the chance to study speaker variation in a shift situation. Variation in proficiency and performance across shifting speakers is not random but systematic and correlates with a set of social and cognitive factors. 

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3. How Good Does This Sound? Examining Listeners’ Second Language Proficiency and Their Perception of Category Goodness in Their Native Language

   https://doi.org/10.3390/languages8010043  

   Nagle, Charlie ; Baese-Berk, Melissa M. ; Diantoro, Carissa ; Kim, Haeun ( March 2023 , Languages)

   Language learners often transfer the sounds and prosody of their native language into their second language, but this influence can also flow in the opposite direction, with the second language influencing the first. Among other variables, language proficiency is known to affect the degree and directionality of cross-linguistic influence. However, little is known about how second language learning affects listeners’ perception of their native language. To begin addressing this gap, we examined the relationship between learners’ second language proficiency and their category goodness ratings in their native language. Thirty-nine English-speaking learners of Spanish listened to English words that began with voiced and voiceless stop consonants and were asked to rate how well the word represented the intended word on a 5-point scale. To create a voicing continuum, we manipulated the voice onset time of the word-initial stop in each target item from 125 ms of prevoicing to 100 ms of aspiration, in 25 ms steps. Proficiency did not affect the perception of voiced targets, but both proficiency and L2 stop production affected the perception of voiceless targets. 

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4. Range in the Use and Realization of BIN in African American English

   https://doi.org/10.1177/00238309221111201  

   Green, Lisa ; Yu, Kristine M. ; Neal, Anissa ; Whitmal, Ayana ; Powe, Tamira ; Özyıldız, Deniz ( July 2022 , Language and Speech)

   This paper jointly considers syntactic, semantic, and phonological/phonetic factors in approaching an understanding of BIN, a remote past marker in African American English that has been described as “stressed.” It brings together data from the Corpus of Regional African American Language (CORAAL) and a production study in a small African American English-speaking community in southwest Louisiana to investigate the use and phonetic realization of BIN constructions. Only 20 instances of BIN constructions were found in CORAAL. This sparsity was not simply due to a dearth of semantic contexts for BIN in the interviews, since 122 instances of semantically equivalent been + temporal adverbial variants were also found. These results raise questions about the extent to which BIN constructions and been + temporal adverbial variants are used in different pragmatic and discourse contexts as well as in different speech styles. The production study elicited BIN and past participle been constructions in controlled syntactic and semantic environments. The phonetic realization of BIN was found to be distributed over the entire utterance rather than localized to BIN. BIN utterances were distinguished from past participle been utterances by having higher ratios of fundamental frequency (F0), intensity, and duration in BIN/ been relative to preceding and following material in the utterance. In both studies, BIN utterances were generally realized with a high F0 peak on BIN and a reduced F0 range in the post- BIN region, with variability in the presence and kinds of F0 movements utterance-initially and utterance-finally, as well as in F0 downtrends in the post- BIN region.

    

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5. Incorporating Word-level Phonemic Decoding into Readability Assessment

   Pinney, Christine ; Kennington, Casey ; Pera, Maria_Soledad ; Landau_Wright, Katherine ; Fails, Jerry_Alan ( June 2024 , Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024))

   Current approaches in automatic readability assessment have found success with the use of large language models and transformer architectures. These techniques lead to accuracy improvement, but they do not offer the interpretability that is uniquely required by the audience most often employing readability assessment tools: teachers and educators. Recent work that employs more traditional machine learning methods has highlighted the linguistic importance of considering semantic and syntactic characteristics of text in readability assessment by utilizing handcrafted feature sets. Research in Education suggests that, in addition to semantics and syntax, phonetic and orthographic instruction are necessary for children to progress through the stages of reading and spelling development; children must first learn to decode the letters and symbols on a page to recognize words and phonemes and their connection to speech sounds. Here, we incorporate this word-level phonemic decoding process into readability assessment by crafting a phonetically-based feature set for grade-level classification for English. Our resulting feature set shows comparable performance to much larger, semantically- and syntactically-based feature sets, supporting the linguistic value of orthographic and phonetic considerations in readability assessment. 

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