Wordlists and other fun!

The formant frequency  graph was fun to fill out.  It was nice to be able to see first hand my vowels and how formants work.   Also, I am feeling much more comfortable using Praat and reading spectrograms.  The reading was kind of difficult to get through and keep all the terminology straight, but definitely helps to be describe more accurately the spectrograms.  Class last week made me rethink all the times I have encountered someone with an accent to try to remember what my impression of them was.  I realized that because of their accent I would make assumptions about where they are from, and though I do not discriminate other people easily can.  It is very upsetting that people are not tolerate of accents because most people can think of a family member that has an accent.  However, it is funny how without any visual information people are very good at predicting ethnicity, but listening is also extremely visual.  The McGurk Effect is the obvious example of this and was really funny listening to it in class.  In my psychology class,  we are learning about how babies learn language, and intonation and visual stimulus are most important to language development.  I can recall many times when I would be unable to understand someone's accent unless I could see their face.  Also when I am listening to a second language, it makes it significantly easier to discern what is being said.  

Linguistic Profiling

I felt extremely guilty while taking this quiz after I had read those two articles about accent discrimination.  Some accents were immediately identifiable, while number 3 was incredibly hard to place and black was the last race I guessed.  However,  I could quickly pick out within the first few words if an accent was Hispanic.  I am assuming that this is because of I have a lot of family members with this accent so I can easily pick it out, similar to recognizing if someone was white.  It got trickier for me between number 1, 3 and 8 because though they were all black, but had extremely different accents (some more familiar to me than others).  But simply the fact that we can tell which race the speaker was by their accent alone informs us about our own stereotypes formed by being exposed to pop culture.  Another clue from the speaker was how they read the common phrase "Mary had a little lamb".  If you were born and raised in the US, you probably heard this nursery rhyme at least a million times whereas if you immigrated to the country this nursery rhyme is not as familiar and therefore read it in a more staccato fashion.  The quiz overall was pretty fun and my roommates enjoyed trying to race who could guess it correctly first.

Trying out accents on Praat!

I decided to try to speak in a southern dialect to be able to compare it to my accent.  The biggest difference between the two spectrograms is the length of time it took me to say each sentence.  I'm not sure if it is because my poor impersonation of a southern accent or just my intense concentration on the pronunciation of each sound naturally made me say the sentence more slowly.  

In my first, spectrogram with me speaking naturally a lot of the words seem to be merged together and more pronounced and dramatic.  Even the difference in the way I said the word "the" is significantly different in each spectrogram,  in the natural one it has a small amplitude, while in my southern accent it has a sharp high amplitude in the beginning and then returns to looking more similar to the natural way i say "the."

The two words with the largest differences are "butter" and "cot."  The way i said "butter" naturally put even emphasis on both syllables where as with my southern accent the second syllable did not have as great an amplitude and slowly returned back to the middle line.  "Cot" is also very different, but the only way i can describe the difference is the shape the waves have made.  In my natural sentence, "cot" looks like a diamond, but in my southern accent it looks more rectangular and overall has a greater amplitude for a longer duration.  

Hearing your voice played back to you is always a strange experience, but adding the horrible imitated southern accent made listening to my own voice even odder, though entertaining.

Regional Accent View

Class on Monday was really interesting.  I feel better about my quiz results now since I realize that maybe I don't have a very distinct accent that people would pick up on ( according to the quiz), but there is slang that sets New Jersey apart.  Because of the Mountain Speech article, I am really hoping to get to hear the Appalachian accent because I do not believe I ever have or ever really paid close attention.  "Fire" and "fair" being pronounced the same seems extremely foreign to me just like the word "flustrated" does, but I guess that is what makes this class interesting.  We are getting to learn about things so different than what I know despite being from the same country.  

IPA is an ingenious system that can account for all languages and just about every sound.  Our names in IPA was a fun way to be introduced to this new alphabet.  I definitely would need more practice with the IPA to be able to decipher it on my own.  I wonder how long this alphabet took to be developed and if it is constantly being changed and added to.  Also as language slowly changes over time, do the sounds we produce in a certain language also change?  And how long would it take for those changes to be added to the IPA?