Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-j824f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-13T08:51:14.477Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

A sociophonetic account of gradient /z/ devoicing among Chicanx high schoolers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 October 2022

Nicole Holliday  and
Franny D. Brogan
Nicole Holliday*
Affiliation:
(Pomona College)
Franny D. Brogan
Affiliation:
(Pomona College)
*
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This paper examines final /z/ devoicing among Chicanx teens in Southern California to investigate the degree to which devoiced final /z/ neutralizes with final /s/ in this dialect. Results indicate on the one hand that devoiced /z/ remains distinct from /s/: as expected, devoiced /z/ is significantly less voiceless than /s/ and has a significantly lower center of gravity (COG). However, unexpectedly, devoiced /z/ has a significantly longer fricative duration and a significantly shorter preceding vowel duration than /s/, a pair of results that run counter to general tendencies for voiced fricatives to be shorter and have longer preceding vowels than their voiceless counterparts. We propose that these durational findings may explain, at least in part, the salience of final /z/ devoicing in Latinx Englishes despite its ubiquity among speakers of mainstream US English. In this first instrumental sociophonetic account of final /z/ devoicing in Latinx Englishes, we also find that, counter to existing segmental accounts, the morphological status of /z/ is no longer a significant predictor of devoicing. Moreover, while both following segment and speaker gender are significant predictors of devoicing, they do not condition devoicing in the expected ways.

Keywords

Obstruent devoicingChicano Englishethnolectal variationyouth languagesociophonetics
Type
Research Article
Information
Language Variation and Change , Volume 34 , Issue 2 , July 2022 , pp. 165 - 182
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Baltazani, Mary. (2006). On /s/-voicing in Greek. Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Greek Linguistics. York: University of York.Google Scholar
Bates, Douglas, Martin, Maechler, Ben, Bolker, & Steve, Walker. (2015). Fitting Linear Mixed-Effects Models Using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software 67:1–48. doi:10.18637/jss.v067.i01CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bayley, Robert. (1994). Consonant cluster reduction in Tejano English. Language Variation and Change 6:303–26. doi:10.1017/S0954394500001708CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bayley, Robert, & Holland, Cory. (2014). Variation in Chicano English: The Case of Final (z) Devoicing. American Speech 89:385–407. doi:10.1215/00031283-2908200CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bayley, Robert, & Messing, Cory L. (2008). Final (z)-devoicing in Chicano English. In Grosvald, M. & Soares, D. (eds.), Proceedings of the 38th Western Conference on Linguistics 19:1–11. Davis: University of California.Google Scholar
Beck, Janet Mackenzie (1999). Organic variation of the vocal apparatus. In Hardcastle, W. J. & Laver, J. (eds.), The handbook of phonetic sciences. 256–89. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Boersma, Paul, & Weenink, David. (2020). Praat: Doing phonetics by computer [Computer software]. Amsterdam, Netherlands. Retrieved from http://www.praat.orgGoogle Scholar
Bolyanatz, Mariška, & Brogan, Franny D. (2021). Acoustic Differences between Chilean and Salvadoran Spanish /s/. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 150(4):2446–60. doi:10.1121/10.0006443CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Browman, Catherine P., & Goldstein, Louis M. (1986). Towards an articulatory phonology. Phonology Yearbook 3:219–52. doi:10.1017/S0952675700000658Google Scholar
Browman, Catherine P., & Goldstein, Louis M. (1989). Articulatory Gestures as Phonological Units. Phonology 6:201–51. doi:10.1017/S0952675700001019CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Browman, Catherine P., & Goldstein, Louis M. (1992). Articulatory phonology: An overview. Phonetica 49:155–80. doi:10.1159/000261913CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Brown, Earl. (2014). “Extract info about /s/” [Praat Script]. Retrieved from http://www-personal.k-state.edu/~ekbrown/#.Google Scholar
Campos-Astorkiza, Rebeka. (2014). Sibilant Voicing Assimilation in Peninsular Spanish as Gestural Blending. In Côte, M.-H., Mathieu, É., & Poplack, S. (eds.), Variation within and across romance languages. 17–38. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Chand, Vineeta. (2009). [v]at is Going On? Local and Global Ideologies about Indian English. Language in Society 38:393–419. doi:10.1017/S0047404509990200CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chappell, Whitney, & García, Christina. (2017). Variable Production and Indexical Social Meaning: On the Potential Physiological Origin of Intervocalic /s/ Voicing in Costa Rican Spanish. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 10:1–37. doi:10.1515/shll-2017-0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Docherty, Gerard J. (1992). The timing of voicing in British English obstruents. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Doviak, Martin J., & Hudson-Edwards, Allison. (1980). Phonological Variation in Chicano English: Word-final (z)-devoicing. In Blansitt, E. L. & Teschner, R. V. (eds.), A Festschrift for Jacob Ornstein: Studies in General Linguistics and Sociolinguistics. Rowley: Newbury House. 82–95.Google Scholar
ELAN (Version 5.7). (2019). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Language Archive [Software]. Retrieved from https://archive.mpi.nl/tla/elanGoogle Scholar
Fought, Carmen R. (2003). Chicano English in Context. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frazer, Timothy C. (1996). Chicano English and Spanish Interference in the Midwestern United States. American Speech 71:72–85. doi:10.2307/455470CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Galindo, Delma Letticia. (1987). Linguistic Influence and Variation on the English of Chicano Adolescents in Austin, Texas. Doctoral dissertation, University of Texas.Google Scholar
Hayes, Bruce, & Steriade, Donca. (2004). Introduction: The Phonetic Bases of Phonological Markedness. In Hayes, B., Kirchner, R., & Steriade, D. (eds.), Phonetically based phonology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Holmes, Janet. (1996). Losing voice: Is Final /z/ Devoicing a Feature of Maori English? World Englishes 15:193–205. doi:10.1111/j.1467-971X.1996.tb00105.xCrossRefGoogle Scholar
José, Brian. (2010). The Apparent-time Construct and Stable Variation: Final /z/ Devoicing in Northwestern Indiana. Journal of Sociolinguistics 14:34–59. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9841.2009.00434.xCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kaiser, Ed. (1997). Strong Fricatives. Amsterdam: Phonetic Sciences. Retrieved from https://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/rob/Courses/InformationInSpeech/CDROM/Literature/LOTwinterschool2006/speech.bme.ogi.edu/tutordemos/SpectrogramReading/cse551html/cse551/node32.htmlGoogle Scholar
Labov, William. (1989). The Child as Linguistic Historian. Language Variation and Change 1:85–97. doi:10.1017/S0954394500000120CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Labov, William. (2001). Principles of linguistic change: social factors (Vol. 2). Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Lindhout, Maartje. (2016). The acquisition of the “voicing” distinction in Dutch fricatives. Master's thesis, Leiden University.Google Scholar
Matuschek, Hannes, Kliegl, Reinhold, Vasishth, Shravan, Baayen, Harald, & Bates, Douglas. (2017). Balancing Type I Error and Power in Linear Mixed Models. Journal of Memory and Language 49:305–15. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2017.01.001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Niebuhr, Oliver, Lancia, Leonardo, & Meunier, Christine. (2008). On Place Assimilation in French Sibilant Sequences. In Sock, R., Fuchs, S., & Laprie, Y. (eds.), 8th International Seminar on Speech Production. Strasbourg: INRIA. 221–24.Google Scholar
Pelekanou, Theodora, & Arvaniti, Amalia. (2001). Postlexical Rules and Gestural Overlap in a Greek Spoken Corpus. In Clairis, C. (ed.), Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Greek Linguistics. Paris: L' Harmattan. 71–74.Google Scholar
R Core Team. (2020). R: A language and environment for statistical computing [Software]. Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. Retrieved from http://www.R-project.org/Google Scholar
Reddy, Sravana, & Stanford, James. (2015). DARLA: A Web Application for Automated Dialect Analysis. In Gerber, M., Havasi, C., & Lacatusu, F. (eds.), Proceedings of the 2015 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Demonstrations. Denver: Association for Computational Linguistics. 71–75.Google Scholar
Rickford, John R., & McNair-Knox, Faye. (1994). Addressee- and Topic-influenced Style Shift: A Quantitative Sociolinguistic Study. In Biber, D. & Finegan, E. (eds.), Sociolinguistic perspectives on register. New York: Oxford University Press. 235–76.Google Scholar
Rigby, Robert A., & Stasinopoulos, D. Mikis. (2005). Generalized Additive Models for Location, Scale and Shape (with Discussion). Applied Statistics 54:507–54.Google Scholar
Romero, Joaquín. (1999). The Effect of Voicing Assimilation on Gestural Coordination. In Ohala, J. J. (ed.), Proceedings of the 14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. Berkeley: University of California. 1793–96.Google Scholar
Salinas, Cristobal, & Lozano, Adele. (2021). The History and Evolution of the Term Latinx. In Murillo, E.G. Jr., Delgado Bernal, D., Morales, S., Urrieta, L. Jr., Ruiz Bybee, E., Sánchez Muñoz, J., Saenz, V.B., Villanueva, D., Machado-Casas, M., & Espinoza, K. (eds.), Handbook of Latinos and education. New York: Routledge. 249–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schilling-Estes, Natalie. (2000). Investigating Intra-Ethnic Differentiation: /Ay/ in Lumbee Native American English. Language Variation and Change 12:141–74. doi:10.1017/S0954394500122021CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schmidt, Lauren B., & Willis, Erik W. (2011). Systematic Investigation of Voicing Assimilation of Spanish /s/ in Mexico City. In Alvord, S. M. (ed.), Selected Proceedings of the 5th Conference on Laboratory Approaches to Romance Phonology. Somerville: Cascadilla Proceedings Project. 1–20.Google Scholar
Smith, Caroline L. (1997). The Devoicing of /z/ in American English: Effects of Local and Prosodic Context. Journal of Phonetics 25:471–500. doi:10.1006/jpho.1997.0053CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thomas, Erik R., & Van Hofwegen, Janneke. (2019). Consonantal Variables Correlated with Ethnicity. In Thomas, E. R. (ed.), Mexican American English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 61–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thompson, Roger M. (1975). Mexican-American English: Social Correlates of Regional Pronunciation. American Speech 50:18–24. doi:10.2307/3087859CrossRefGoogle Scholar
US Census. (2020). United States Census of 2020. https://www.census.gov/2020census. Accessed on 06/28/2022.Google Scholar
Verhoeven, Jo, Hirson, Allen, & Basavaraj, Kavya. (2011). The Devoicing of Fricatives in Southern British English. In Lee, W. & Zee, E. (eds.), Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Phonetic Sciences. Hong Kong: City University of Hong Kong. 2070–73.Google Scholar
Wickham, Hadley. (2016). ggplot2: Elegant graphics for data analysis. New York: Springer-Verlag.CrossRefGoogle Scholar