Phonetic Variation and Self-Recorded Data

Lauren Hall-Lew & Zac Boyd@dialect & @zacboyd_The University of Edinburgh

Self-Recordings & Sociolinguistic Methods

• Self-Recordings• “Non-Participant Observation”• When participants record their speech without a

researcher present

• Why they’re appealing:• Potentially improving the ecological validity • Potentially reducing the Observer’s Paradox

• Or, at least, changing it (cf., Wilson 1987, Schøning & Møller 2009)

Self-Recordings & Sociophonetic Methods

• Challenges:• Ethical issues

• participant obtaining consent from other participants• self-recordings made in public places

• Logistical issues• equipment; paperwork; scheduling…• inability to control the ambient noise of the recording• inability to control the amount of speech per recording

• Analytical issues• lack of researcher knowledge about the social context• different self-recordings may be very stylistically different

• (Meyerhoff, Schleef, & MacKenzie 2015:56)

• Some of these issues are changing….

Self-Recordings & Sociophonetic Methods

• Sociophonetic research typically considers:• A range of speech styles but no self-recordings• Pseudo-self-recordings

• (with a researcher present but participating)• e.g., Hindle (1979)

• Only self-recordings, with no comparison styles• e.g, Podesva (2006, et seq.)• e.g., analyses of YouTubers (e.g., Schneider 2016)

• Some exceptions:• Sharma (2011); Boyd et al. (2015)

Self-Recordings & Sociophonetic Methods

Sharma (2011)

• Who:• Residents of Southall, a majority South Asian neighbourhood

of London.• Variables:

• Four binary phonetic variables indexing South Asian identity• Styles:

• Sociolinguistic interview• Self-recordings with an ethnically diverse range of interlocutors

• Results• Effects of interview vs. self-recording are clearly linked to

ethnic indexicality and speaker ethnicity, not the stylistic context per se.

Sharma (2011:477, Figure 4, ‘Simran’)

• Interviewer:• South Asian

• Self-recording interlocutors:• White British

• Variation:• Monophthongal /e/

variants are absent in the self-recording.

• No difference for the other three variables.

Sharma (2011:475, Figure 3, ‘Anwar’)

Research Questions

• Our main question today:• How does speech obtained from self-recordings

compare to speech from sociolinguistic interviews, more generally?

• Levon (2013:211)• “Fortunately, the use of self-recording with semi-

informed collaborators does not necessarily lead to significant performative shifts, possibly because the exigencies of the actual interaction tend to dominate.”• To what extent does that hold across different types of self-

recordings?

Research Questions

• P.S. Another question we’re asking in this project:

• How does non-/minimally scripted speech obtained from ‘laboratory’ elicitation tasks compare to speech from sociolinguistic interview tasks?

• The Map Task (Brown et al. 1984)

• both in dialogue & monologue (Scarborough et al. 2007)

• The Diapix Task (Baker & Hazan 2011)

• both in dialogue & monologue• Narrating a picture book (e.g., Troiani et al. 2008)

• Narrating a silent film (e.g., Chafe 1980)

• And how do those styles compare to self-recorded speech?

Boyd, Elliott, Fruehwald, Hall-Lew, & Lawrence (2015)

• ‘Vicky’• F, Chinese American• b. 1985, rec. 2013• San Francisco, CA• Lauren as fieldworker

• Styles• Interview (baseline)• ‘Laboratory’ tasks• ‘Selfrecord’ (x3)

• What about other linguistic variables?

• What about other speakers?

• What about types of self-recordings?

Boyd, Elliott, Fruehwald, Hall-Lew, & Lawrence (2015)

Today: Speakers & Social Factors

‘Name’ Year Born

Year Recorded

Place Born

Place Recorded

Heritage Ethnicity

Other L1

Immigrant Generation

Kat 1986 2016 SF Easy Bay Edinburgh Chinese Taiwanese Mandarin 2

Piper 1988 2016 Louisville, KY Edinburgh Greek N/A 3

Vicky 1985 2013 San Francisco San Francisco Chinese Shanghainese 2

Today: Speakers & Self-Recordings

‘Name’ Self-Recording 1 Self-Recording 2 Self-Recording 3

Kat Hanging out / meetingwith a friend (♂)

Lunch with friends* (♀, ♀)

Skype call with a friend (♀)

Piper Celebration party withfriends (♀, ♀, ♀) [technical error] At home with

her visiting mother (♀)

Vicky Hanging out with friends (♂, ♂)

Lunch with a friend (♂)

Cooking at home with sister (♀)

Which variable? /s/

• Sibilant variation has been studied with respect to to:• Duration• Spectral moments

• Our acoustic measures: 1st 4 spectral moments:• Center of Gravity (CoG), Standard Deviation, Skewness, Kurtosis

• Previous work on /s/ has found correlations with:• Speech style

• ‘conversational’ vs. ‘clear’/‘read’• Gender & sexual identity

• of the speaker• of the interlocutor

/s/ + recording context

• Tucker et al. (2016)• /s/ CoG is higher in read

speech (TIMIT corpus) than conversational speech (Buckeye corpus)

• Pattern holds for all fricatives.

• Maniwa et al. (2009)• /s/ CoG is higher in clear

speech than conversational speech (lab)

• Pattern holds for /f, v, θ, z/

/s/ + gender & sexual identity

• /s/ variation between men and women• /s/ variation and male speakers

• /s/ variation and female speakers

• Gender & sexual identity of the speaker:• Podesva & Van Hofwegen (2014)

• Gender & sexual identity of the interlocutor:• Saigusa (2016)

Podesva & Van Hofwegen (2014)

• Redding, CA• pop. 90% white

• Sociolx interviews

• Groups of women:• trans women (2)• lesbians (4)• straight women

• country (7)• town (11)

Thanks to Rob Podesva for the original image

Saigusa (2016)

• Jane Lynch• lesbian celebrity

• Televised interviews• Rachel Maddow

(MSNBC)• lesbian

• Gayle King & Erica Hill (CBS)• neither lesbian

(presumed straight)

Thanks to Julie Saigusa for the data to generate the image

Studies on women & /s/

Study # of spkrs

SexualOrientation Social Factor Result

Podesva & Van Hofwegen (2014) 24 various speaker identity sig. lower CoG among

lesbians

Saigusa (2016) 1 lesbian interlocutoridentity

sig. lower CoG whentalking to another lesbian

Today’s Talk 3 straightinterlocutor;

recording context

?

Methods• Mixed-effects models:

• One per speaker

• Main effects:• DURATION

• POSITION in syllable• PRECEDING phonological

environment• FOLLOWING phonological

environment• INTERLOCUTOR

• Random intercept:• WORD

• Dependent Variable: • Center of Gravity of /s/

• 5,711 /s/ tokens total• (3 speakers)• Extracted from FAVE

alignments (Rosenfelder et al. 2014)

• Omitted tokens: • all str- clusters• outliers (±2 StDev)• tokens < 30ms

Overall Speaker Differences

Without Self-Recording Data

**

*

* =  sig.  at  any  level

♂♀, ♀

♀

*

*

♀

♀, ♀, ♀

*

*

♂ ♂, ♂♀

**

**

Without Self-Recording Data

With Self-Recording Data

Summary

• The direction of variation obtained from the self-recordings differs across speakers.

• But in each case, self-recordings result in production patterns beyond the range of those obtained from the tasks in a traditional sociolinguistic interview.

• “While laboratory materials are very useful in many ways, they are problematic in others. They only scratch the surface of the informants’ phonetic repertoire and thus limit the theoretical inferences that can be drawn with respect to speech planning or phonological knowledge.”- Foulkes, Scobbie & Watt (2010: 728)

• While interviews do more than ‘scratch the surface’, data from self-recordings suggests that we can dig deeper, still.

Self-recordings & Linguistic Knowledge

Thank you!

• Thanks for your attention!

• Thanks also to:

• Our generous speakers-turned-fieldworkers.• Our volunteer research assistant, Gussie White.• Collaborators on Boyd et al. (2015),

• Zuzana Elliott• Joe Fruehwald• Daniel Lawrence

• Members of the Language Variation and Change Research Group at the University of Edinburgh.

Selected References• Boyd, Z., Elliott, Z., Fruehwald, J., Hall-Lew, L., and Lawrence, D. 2015. An Evaluation of Different Sociolinguistic

Elicitation Methods. In The Scottish Consortium for ICPhS 2015 (Ed.), Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. Glasgow, UK: The University of Glasgow.

• Hindle, D. M. 1979. The social and situational conditioning of phonetic variation. PhD Thesis, Univ. of Pennsylvania.

• Levon, Erez. 2013. Ethnography and recording interaction. In Robert J. Podesva and Devyani Sharma (Eds.), Research Methods in Linguistics, pp195-215. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

• Maniwa, K., Jongman, A., & Wade, T. 2009. Acoustic characteristics of clearly spoken English fricatives. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 125(6), 3962-3973.

• Podesva, R. J. 2007. Phonation Type as a Stylistic Variable: The Use of Falsetto in Constructing a Persona. Journal of Sociolinguistics 11, 478-504.

• Podesva, R. J., & Van Hofwegen, J. (2014). How Conservatism and Normative Gender Constrain Variation in Inland California: The Case of /s/. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics, 20(2), 15.

• Rosenfelder, I., Fruehwald, J., Evanini, K., Seyfarth, S., Gorman, K., Prichard, H. and Yuan, J. 2014. FAVE 1.1.3.ZENODO. doi:10.5281/zenodo.9846.

• Saigusa, J. 2016. Jane Lynch and /s/: The Effect of Addressee Sexuality on Fricative Realization. Lifespans & Styles: Undergraduate Working Papers on Intraspeaker Variation 2(1):10-16.

• Schneider, E. W. 2016. World Englishes on YouTube. In World Englishes: New theoretical and methodological considerations, pp253-282.

• Schøning, S. & J. S. Møller. 2009. Self-recordings as a social activity. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 32(2), 245-269.• Sharma, D. 2011. Style repertoire and social change in British Asian English. Journal of Sociolinguistics,

15(4):464–492.• Tucker, Benjamin V., Viktor Kharlamov, and Daniel Brenner. 2016. “What the Zed? The Acoustics of Conversational

Fricatives in Mid-Western American English.” Presented at NoWPhon 2016.• Wagner, Petra, Jürgen Trouvain, and Frank Zimmerer. 2015. In defense of stylistic diversity in speech research.

Journal of Phonetics 48:1-12.• Wilson, John. 1987. The Sociolinguistic Paradox: Data as a Methodological Product. Language & Communication

7(2):161-177

Laboratory Task References• Baker, R., Hazan, V. 2011. DiapixUK: A task for the elicitation of spontaneous speech dialogs. Behavior

Research Methods, 43(4), 761-770.

• Brown, G., Anderson, A. H., Shillcock, R. and Yule, G. 1984. Teaching Talk: Strategies for production and assessment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

• Chafe, W. 1980. The pear stories: Cognitive, cultural, and linguistic aspects of narrative production. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

• Labov, W. 2001. Principles of Linguistic Change. Volume 2: Social Factors. Oxford: Blackwell.

• Troiani, V., Fernández-Seara, M. A., Wang, Z., Detre, J. A., Ash, S. and Grossman, M. 2008. Narrative speech production: an fMRI study using continuous arterial spin labeling. Neuroimage, 40(2): 932–939.

• Scarborough, R., Brenier, J., Zhao, J., Hall-Lew, L., and Dmitrieva, O. 2007. An Acoustic Study of Real and Imagined Foreigner-Directed Speech. Publication of the 16th International Conference of the Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS XVI). Saarbrücken, Germany.

• Varon, S. 2007. Robot Dreams. New York: First Second.

Two interviews in two different years