Second dialect acquisition

When people move to new regions, how do they change aspects of their accent, and what do these changes tell us about how words and sounds are represented in the mind? I've interviewed born-and-bred Canadians who moved as adults to the New York City region to find out whether they had adopted dialect features of their new region or maintained features of their native dialect. It seems that they do both, depending on the feature - and the reasons for this are both linguistic and social. In more recent work, I've observed that these speakers also style shift, using features of their first and second dialects to convey stance and complex place identity.

I'm continuing and broadening this work as part of an NSF-supported project titled Second Dialect Acquisition and Stylistic Variation in Mobile Speakers. Read more about the project (and if applicable, sign up to participate!) here.

Selected papers

Nycz, Jennifer. 2018. Stylistic variation among mobile speakers: Using old and new regional variables to construct complex place identity. Language Variation and Change 30(20): 175-202.

Nycz, Jennifer. 2016. Awareness and acquisition of new dialect features. In Babel, Anna (ed.), Awareness and Control in Sociolinguistic Research. Cambridge University Press. 62-79.

Nycz, Jennifer. 2015. Second dialect acquisition: A sociophonetic perspective. Language and Linguistics Compass 9: 469-482.

Johnson, Daniel Ezra and Jennifer Nycz. 2015. Partial mergers and near-distinctions: Stylistic layering in dialect acquisition. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 21(2): Article 13.

Nycz, Jennifer. 2013. New contrast acquisition: Methodological issues and theoretical implications. English Language & Linguistics 17(2): 325-357.

Nycz, Jennifer. 2013. Changing words or changing rules? Second dialect acquisition and phonological representation. Journal of Pragmatics 52: 49–62. Click here for a video of me talking about this paper with the Memorial University Newfoundland Sociolinguistics Reading Group!

Nycz, Jennifer. 2011. Second Dialect Acquisition: Implications for Theories of Phonological Representation. Doctoral Dissertation, New York University.

Vowel merger and distinction

As a native of New Jersey, I pronounce words like cot and caught (don and dawn, sock and talk...) with different vowel sounds - most of the time! Many other speakers of English produce this difference too, though the exact quality of their vowel sounds may differ from mine. And many other speakers produce no difference between these sounds, so that pairs like cot and caught sound alike.

This state of affairs raises lots of questions, both empirical and theoretical: How do speakers vary the way they realize this sort of vowel difference in different contexts? What happens when speakers who treat these words differently meet up and start talking to one another? Can people change how they produce vowel differences over their lifespan? What does all of this tell us about how vowels are represented, and how those representations may change?

In previous work I've examined how people change their cot/caught vowels over time as a result of contact with a new regional dialect. I'm currently working with Daniel Ezra Johnson on a project that looks at how such vowel changes vary depending on speech style. Lauren Hall-Lew and I have also assessed various methods of analyzing vowel differences, to help linguists who are interested in this topic choose appropriate methods for their data.

Phonetics of short-a

Speakers in the Mid-Atlantic region may vary the way they produce the short a vowel in words like pan, pass, pad, and pat. Nearly everyone in this region produces a vowel sound in pan which is audibly different from that of pat, but the a in words like pass and pad is more variable - it may sound more like the vowel in pan, more like the vowel in pat, or somewhere in between. Moreover, there are multiple articulatory strategies for realizing these differences.

Paul De Decker and I have studied variation in the acoustic and articulatory characteristics of short-a in New Jersey, using ultrasound to track tongue gestures. Our work indicates that speakers from the same region and community may, from an acoustic standpoint, exhibit qualitatively different tensing systems, consistent with previous work. In addition, even those with the same acoustic system may vary in terms of how this system is articulated. This research raises questions for future study, such as: to what extent do speakers have a "choice" with respect to which articulatory strategy they employ, and how may these strategies be socially distributed?

Selected papers

Nycz, Jennifer & Lauren Hall-Lew. 2014. Best practices in measuring vowel merger. Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics 20. http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/1.4894063

Nycz, Jennifer. 2013. New contrast acquisition: Methodological issues and theoretical implications. English Language & Linguistics 17(2): 325-357.

De Decker, Paul & Jennifer Nycz. 2012. Are tense [æ]s really tense? The mapping between articulation and acoustics. Lingua 122:7. Corrected and color figures.

Research methods in phonetics

Before you can begin to explain patterns in your data, you need to a) collect the data and b) analyze it appropriately. Several of my collaborative projects involve comparing or developing ways of dealing with data at various stages of collection and analysis.

For example, Paul De Decker and I have examined how different audio compression formats affect vowel formant measurements. Our work has found that while some compression algorithms and commonly-available recording devices may be used (with caution!) to source data for sociophonetic studies, others significantly distort the vowel space in ways that render the data unreliable for acoustic analysis.

Paul and I have also explored how novel methods of analysis may be incorporated into sociophonetic research. One such project is the application of smoothing spline ANOVA to the comparison of vowel formants; this method enables the researcher to compare whole formant trajectories rather than simple point measurements, which do not reflect the dynamic nature of vowel acoustics.

Lauren Hall-Lew and I wrote a paper which compares different methods for quantifying vowel difference, to support our individual research projects in vowel merger and distinction as well as those of the wider sociophonetics community.

Right now I'm working with Shannon Mooney to develop a fun new task for examining phonetic convergence among pairs of speakers.

Selected papers

Nycz, Jennifer & Lauren Hall-Lew. 2014. Best practices in measuring vowel merger. Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics 20. http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/1.4894063

De Decker, Paul & Jennifer Nycz. 2013. The technology of conducting sociolinguistic interviews. In Mallinson, Christine, Becky Childs & Gerard van Herk (eds.), Data Collection in Sociolinguistics, pg. 118-126.

De Decker, Paul & Jennifer Nycz. 2011. For the Record: Which Digital Media Can be Used for Sociophonetic Analysis? University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 17:2, Article 7.