This month I gave a talk at ICPhS 2023 in Prague, on the cot/caught distinction in the speech of native New Yorkers living in Toronto and native Torontonians living in New York City. Here’s the proceedings paper!
Praha, glimpsed through the trees of Petřín Hill
In June I participated in the LabPhon Satellite Session “Challenges for Change: A Crowd-Sources Brainstorming Session” organized by Valerie Freeman and Paul De Decker. My talk (based on work with Yoojin Kang) was about sources of participant variability in remote or web-based research and ways to overcome them. Thanks to Valerie, Paul, and all the presenters and participants for a great discussion!
My chapter on English Phonetics now appears in the (e-book) 2nd edition of the Wiley Handbook of English Linguistics, edited by Bas Aarts, April McMahon and Lars Hinrichs. You can see a preview of the chapter in Google Books.
As I write in the introduction, “My goal in this chapter is to describe those phonetic features which are typically characteristic of English varieties, while also giving a sense of the phonetic diversity to be found within this language”, and I accordingly cite a lot of recent sociophonetics work. My hope is that this chapter is useful for students or anyone else who needs an intro to or refresher on English phonetics (perhaps because they are taking a course in Sociolinguistics or Applied Linguistics that assumes such knowledge).
My short report, Media and Second Dialect Acquisition, is now published online at Annual Review of Applied Linguistics. Sociolinguistic research suggests that traditional broadcast media (i.e. TV) doesn’t seem to affect people’s accents much, at least not in a way that’s easy to empirically document; at the same time, phonetics research has shown that participants will measurably shift their accents towards ambient recorded voices. What gives? In this paper, I explore this disconnect and suggest some possibilities for future research exploring new/social media and its effect on accent.