Most Important Feature in Language Comprehension: Part II

Nearly two months after I first decided on what I believe to be the most important feature in language comprehension, I still believe that sounds are more important than syntax or vocabulary, for the same reasons I did before. A recent experience supports me in this claim: when watching "Das Leben Des Anderen" (The Lives of Others), a German-language film, I was able to comprehend a good deal of the movie even though I do not speak German fluently. Although I was unfamiliar with much of the vocabulary, and some of the syntax was not phrased the same way I would have phrased it, I could have written out the script as I was listening to the movie because I understood all the sounds being made. The sounds were familiar to me, and so I could understand the speech even if not all the specific words. And even though German syntax can be sometimes confusing ("I went to the supermarket to buy some meat" = "I have to the supermarket some meat to buy gone"), I could rearrange the words in my head and make sense of it. This experience, being conducted in a foreign language, is an extreme version of the comprehension between speakers of different dialects of the same language.

Lexical Differences

In my experience, lexical differences are less of a hamper in comprehension of another person's dialect. Vocabulary can be easily explained, and context plays a huge role in understanding what another person is saying. It is not important for someone to understand every word another person is saying - through tone of voice, nonverbal clues, and context, one can almost always figure out what the unknown word means. The problem arises when a word is given out of context, such as descriptive expletives. One example I can give of this is the word "hyphy" (I'm not sure how this is spelled, having never seen it in writing). As far as I can tell, the word is used frequently in Northern California, perhaps only in the Bay Area, which is where my roommate Maddy is from. She uses the word hyphy when giving her opinion on types of music and a kind of drunk/high state that people are in. I had never heard it before she used it. When I asked her to explain its meaning, she could not define it using words, but rather showed me several videos on YouTube that apparently were of "hyphy music." She even asked her boyfriend, who is from the same area as her, to define the word and he could not. I have heard that the word "crunk" is a synonym for hyphy that is used on the East Coast. In Portland, where I am from, if someone is high, drunk, and dancing, we use those three words to describe the person. So my not knowing the word hyphy didn't really impede conversation between me and Maddy, because she showed me to some degree what she meant and we moved past it.
Other lexical differences I have noticed have to do with synonyms, like hyphy/crunk, spike/cleat (the kind of shoe that soccer players and cross country runners wear), and pop/soda. For the most part, both participants in conversation are aware of the other words used as synonyms, and when someone repeats the word to question its meaning the speaker can seamlessly supply the synonym. I suppose there would arise more problems for people who speak English as a second language, because they would generally learn just one word for a particular object or concept. However, even then lexical differences are much easier to circumlocute than the struggles that arise with discrepancies in sounds made to create the lexicon of English. Over the course of this quarter as I have been recording miscommunications that arise, the majority have resulted from differences in pronunciation.

Potential Future Experiments

I came up with this idea for a new experiment examining the perception of regional dialects while reading the Clopper/Pisoni study assigned for reading this week. The study was conducted at Indiana University, and used all college students. However, it did not state how long the students had been at college, which I think would hugely affect the students' dialect perception. I remember when we were going around class talking about our ideas for our projects, Meghan mentioned a few times that it was important in a few cases that we do them sooner rather than later to make sure the participants are least changed from their natural dialects. So my idea is to compare the dialect perceptions of students arriving at college with those of students after certain amounts of time - after freshman year, or after all four years of undergraduate school, or somewhere in between.

Vowel List and Class Discussion Analyses

Formant Charts
I was somewhat surprised by the results of the formant chart I created using the eight cardinal vowels. My eight did not shoot four diagonally down to the right, then four straight up the back - rather, they formed a kind of strangled shape where the sounds found in "had," "hod," and "hawed" (I can't write the IPA symbols in this blog) where clustered together in the far right bottom, and the other five - "heed," "hid," "head," "hood," and "who'd" - created a V shape that was in the center vertically and a bit to the left. I think the results can be explained by this: my knowledge of IPA is still limited enough that I had to rely on the example h-d words provided rather than the vowel symbols to pronounce the word list, which leads me to think that my personal accent deviates from standard American English in certain vowels. The most obvious example is my cot/caught merger - I still don't understand how those two words can be pronounced differently, so I pronounced "hod" and "hawed" almost identically. Also, I think I may have been focusing too hard on producing the correct sounds in the same vowel lengths, and the way I ended up pronouncing a lot of the words is not perhaps how I would say them unselfconsciously. I will be very interested to see how closely the other people in the class match the chart in the text - I think of myself as having less of an accent than some, because the "Which American Accent Are You?" quiz labeled me as Midland. Maybe if I were more comfortable identifying the IPA vowel sounds without example words, I could have produced the sounds more truthfully.

Class Discussion
For me, the most interesting part of class was the tenseness that arose when Meghan asked us how we felt about the government encouraging languages other than English in public settings. Only a couple of people offered opinions, and the question seemed very politically charged. When I gave my opinion, which was a bit more conservative than others, I felt uncomfortable and guilty - no one replied to it, which added to the silent tenseness. I wonder why this one question immediately made the class uneasy - was it just politics, or did the issue resonate more personally with students than other things we have discussed in class?
I also found it interesting that even though we come from all corners of the US, we had almost exactly the same associations of foreign accents with certain stereotypes. This makes me suspect that we base these assumptions off things we see on national television or in nationally circulated media rather than from our family members and neighbors - the latter category would probably we a lot more diverse in the associations.

Linguistic Profiling Quiz

The quiz was harder for me than I had thought it would be! I was able to correctly identify on first try the white, Middle Eastern, and Indian speakers, but the black and Hispanic speakers were a lot harder. In fact, it was a third try each time for the Hispanic speakers before I got it right. I suspect this is because living in the self-professed whitest city in America has not exposed me to a lot of different ethnicities. In my mind there is a very set way that Hispanics speak, which I probably have garnered from TV shows or movies such as "Napoleon Dynamite," and the three Hispanic speakers did not fit the bill perfectly. But by far the hardest one was Black Caribbean - I asked friends to listen to it as well, and we had to look at the answers before it made sense. My only notion of Caribbean accents comes from watching "Pirates of the Caribbean," but most of those characters were white and the black characters did not sound at all like the man's recorded voice in the quiz. Overall, I think my lack of exposure to the different American ethnicities of black and Hispanic (I do frequently speak to first-generation Middle Easterners and Indians) made it hard for me to guess correctly. I did not realize that Portland was so insular! But then again, I didn't realize there were even such things as Chicago and Bay Area and Northeast accents before coming here and taking this class.

Spectrogram Comparisons

When recording "the butter spilled on the cot," I first recorded myself in a normal speaking voice, and then put on a Southern accent for the second recording. Here are the observations I made when comparing the two resulting spectrograms (I'm going to refer to the two as "normal" and "southern"):

• In normal, my individual words were more pronounced from the silence in between them; each word was given a more or less even weight, and the words were distinct and separate on the spectrogram.
• In contrast, in southern the non-e vowels were a lot longer and more emphasized - "the" and the second syllable of "butter" were a lot softer and shorter than the syllables "bUtt-," "spIlled," "cOt," and to a lesser degree "On."
• Singling out the word "butter": in normal the two syllables had about even amplitude, and the second syllable was a bit longer; in southern the first syllable had a lot larger amplitude and was quite a bit longer than the second.
• In normal in the phrase "spilled on the cot," each word was distinct with an even level of noise between each that constituted the silence; the puff of air produced at the end of "cot" as the "t" produced waves not present in southern; and there was a definite break between "spilled" and "on," with a wave group for the letter "d."
• In southern in the phrase "spilled on the cot," the vowels of the entire phrase sort of ran into each other, with no apparent pauses in between words; there were no waves for the sounds "d" and "t" produced at the ends of "spilled" and "cot."
• When I zoned in on just the "o" sound of "cot" in both spectrograms, I noticed that there was fluctuation in southern with the amplitude sustaining itself, then dropping briefly, and rising again all within the vowel, whereas the vowel in normal held an even amplitude.

6 October

I felt that the article we discussed in class, "Mountain Speech," was more fun than informative. This is undoubtedly due to the fact that it was an informal summary of a book that went into novel-length descriptions of Southern Mountain dialects. In the author's paraphrases of the book, she rewords things vaguely and un-scientifically, which makes it more accessible for the average reader but also more difficult to distinguish what it is exactly she means. For example, I am confused by her statement "[the "r"] is also usually blended with a preceding vowel;" I remember that we discussed this particular statement in class and general consensus found it puzzling. She also cites as other distinctions of mountain speech "crossing the vowel as in funeral (furnal)," "house is prnouned ha-h-uhs," and "because of the habit of thrusting forward the chin forward sounds are often dragged out." These pithy assertions, while perhaps making perfect sense in the author's mind, do not convey exactly what it is he/she means because they do not use a standard method of conveying pronunciation.

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It's hard for me to give a general statement on my views on regional accents; I don't have one view about the whole of them. I am neither Meghan nor her brother (the first loves all accents, the second thinks that anyone who deviates from 'standard' English should be corrected). I can say that I think that for the past decade or so, the younger generation of Americans have began a slide toward losing distinct dialects and melding together because of the proliferation of online channels like YouTube and Facebook. With so much intercommunication, words and phrases that were once specific to certain states, cities, or even schools are now being spread around the internet to others much faster than if the internet were not being used. For example, when reading one of the articles from the American Dialect Links website, I came across a Texan Lexicon site, which listed a bunch of very Texan sayings that I, despite coming from a Texan family, have never heard. Phrases like "You're as happy as a gopher in soft dirt" and "like a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs" seem quaint and outdated, because I could never imagine anyone in generations X or Y saying them. But maybe this only concerns vocabulary; after all, television has been spreading the so-called "TV voice," or midland accent, around for decades and yet regional dialects resisted becoming more like it. I personally hope that regional accents remain colorful and distinctive, if for no other reason than entertainment.