Abstract
Sociolinguistic data collection traditionally includes interviews, reading passages, and word lists (Labov 1972). Researchers have increasingly sought out elicitation tasks that have the benefits of tasks based on reading aloud (e.g., studying infrequently occurring variables; controlling for linguistic factors; eliciting the same lexical items across participants) while also eliciting styles more comparable to interview speech (see Drager 2018). Examples include the Map Task (Brown et al. 1984) and the Diapix task (Baker and Hazan 2011). Other researchers have turned instead to elicitation tasks that maximize ecological validity, taking themselves out of the recording context and training participants to collect field recordings (e.g., Podesva 2007; Sharma 2011). But how comparable is the speech elicited from each of these tasks? Building on results from previous research (Boyd et al. 2015; Hall-Lew and Boyd 2017) we consider three US English speakers’ vowel productions from interviews, reading passages, ‘Lab Tasks’, and self-recordings. We suggest that both Lab Tasks and self-recordings have the potential to increase descriptive accuracy and indexical analysis in sociophonetic research.
References
Anderson, Anne H., Miles Bader, Ellen Gurman Bard, Elizabeth Boyle, Gwyneth Doherty, Simon Garrod, Stephen Isard, Jacqueline Kowtko, Jan McAllister, Jim Miller, Catherine Sotillo, Henry S. Thompson & Regina Weinert. 1991. The HCRC map task corpus. Language and Speech 34(4). 351–366.10.1177/002383099103400404Search in Google Scholar
Baker, Rachel & Valerie Hazan. 2011. DiapixUK: A task for the elicitation of spontaneous speech dialogs. Behavior Research Methods 43(4). 761–770.10.3758/s13428-011-0075-ySearch in Google Scholar
Bamberg, Michael & Virginia Marchman. 1991. Binding and unfolding: Towards the linguistic construction of narrative discourse. Discourse Processes 14(3). 277–305.10.1080/01638539109544787Search in Google Scholar
Becker, Kara. 2014. The social motivations of reversal: Raised BOUGHT in New York City English. Language in Society 43(4). 395–420.10.1017/S0047404514000372Search in Google Scholar
Bell, Allan. 1984. Language style as audience design. Language in Society 13. 145–204.10.1017/S004740450001037XSearch in Google Scholar
Boyd, Zac. 2018. A certain kind of gay identity: [s+] and contextually mediated variation in bilingual French and German men. In Z. Boyd (ed.), Cross-linguistic variation of /s/ as an index of non-normative sexual orientation and masculinity in French and German men. 114–142. Edinburgh, UK: The University of Edinburgh, doctoral dissertation.Search in Google Scholar
Boyd, Zac & Lauren Hall-Lew. 2018. Stylistic variation in eliciting controlled but spontaneous speech. Poster presentation at New Ways of Analysing Variation 47. New York, NY. 18–21 October.Search in Google Scholar
Boyd, Zac, Zuzana Elliot, Josef Fruehwald, Lauren Hall-Lew & Daniel Lawrence. 2015. An Evaluation of 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.Search in Google Scholar
Brown, Gillian, Anne H. Anderson, Richard Shillcock & George Yule. 1984. Teaching talk: Strategies for production and assessment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Cardoso, Amanda, Lauren Hall-Lew, Yova Kemenchedjieva & Ruaridh Purse. 2016. Between California and the Pacific Northwest: The front lax vowels in San Francisco English. In Valerie Fridland, Betsy Evans, Tyler Kendall & Alicia Wassink (eds.), Speech in the Western States, Volume 1: The coastal states, 33–54. Publication of the American Dialect Society. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.10.1215/00031283-3772890Search in Google Scholar
Chafe, Wallace L. 1980. The pear stories: Cognitive, cultural, and linguistic aspects of narrative production. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.Search in Google Scholar
D’Onofrio, Annette. 2015. Persona-based information shapes linguistic perception: Valley girls and California vowels. Journal of Sociolinguistics 19(2). 241–256.10.1111/josl.12115Search in Google Scholar
D’Onofrio, Annette. 2018. Controlled and automatic perceptions of a sociolinguistic marker. Language Variation and Change, 30(2). 261–285.10.1017/S095439451800008XSearch in Google Scholar
Deterding, David. 2006. The north wind versus a wolf: Short texts for the description and measurement of English pronunciation. Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 36(2). 187–196.10.1017/S0025100306002544Search in Google Scholar
Drager, Katie. 2018. Experimental Research Methods in Sociolinguistics. Bloomsbury Publishing.10.5040/9781474251815Search in Google Scholar
Eckert, Penelope. 2004. Vowel Shifts in Northern California and the Detroit Suburbs: Northern California Vowels. http://web.stanford.edu/~eckert/vowels.html (Accessed 1 August 2019).Search in Google Scholar
ELAN (Version 5.0.0-beta). 2017. Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. https://tla.mpi.nl/tools/tla-tools/elan/download/ (Accessed 1 August 2019).Search in Google Scholar
Fairbanks, Grant. 1966. Experimental phonetics: Selected articles. Champaign, Illinois: University of Illinois Press.Search in Google Scholar
Gordon, Matthew. 2000. Phonological correlates of ethnic identity: Evidence of divergence? American Speech 75(2). 115–136.10.1215/00031283-75-2-115Search in Google Scholar
Grieser, Jessica A. 2019. Investigating topic-based style shifting in the classic sociolinguistic interview. American Speech: A Quarterly of Linguistic Usage 94(1). 54–71.10.1215/00031283-7322011Search in Google Scholar
Hall-Lew, Lauren & Zac Boyd. 2017. Phonetic variation and self-recorded data. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics, 23(2). 85–95.Search in Google Scholar
Hall-Lew, Lauren, Amanda Cardoso, Yova Kemenchedjieva, Kieran Wilson, Ruaridh Purse & Julie Saigusa. 2015. San Francisco English and the California vowel shift. In The Scottish Consortium for ICPhS 2015 (ed.), Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. Glasgow, UK: The University of Glasgow. Paper number 591. ISBN 978-0-85261-941-4.Search in Google Scholar
Labov, William. 1966. The social stratification of English in New York City. Washington: Center for Applied Linguistics, Washington DC.Search in Google Scholar
Labov, William. 1972. Some principles of linguistic methodology. Language in Society 1(1). 97–120.10.1017/S0047404500006576Search in Google Scholar
Labov, William, Ingrid Rosenfelder, & Josef Fruehwald. 2013. One hundred years of sound change in Philadelphia: Linear incrementation, reversal, and reanalysis. Language 89(1). 30–65.10.1353/lan.2013.0015Search in Google Scholar
Levon, Erez. 2013. Ethnography and recording interaction. In Robert J. Podesva & Devyani Sharma (eds.), Research methods in linguistics, 195–215. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9781139013734.011Search in Google Scholar
Lobanov, Boris M. 1971. Classification of Russian vowels spoken by different speakers. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. 49(2B). 606–608.10.1121/1.1912396Search in Google Scholar
Mallinson, Christine, Becky Childs, & Gerard Van Herk. 2013. Data collection in sociolinguistics: Methods and applications. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.10.4324/9780203136065Search in Google Scholar
Maniwa, Kazumi, Allard Jongman & Travis Wade. 2009. Acoustic characteristics of clearly spoken English fricatives. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 125. 3962–3973.10.1121/1.2990715Search in Google Scholar
Meyerhoff, Miriam, Erik Schleef & Lauren MacKenzie. 2015. Doing sociolinguistics: A practical guide to data collection and analysis. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.10.4324/9781315723167Search in Google Scholar
Podesva, Robert J. 2007. Phonation type as a stylistic variable: The use of falsetto in constructing a persona. Journal of Sociolinguistics 11. 478–504.10.1111/j.1467-9841.2007.00334.xSearch in Google Scholar
Podesva, Robert J. 2011a. Salience and the social meaning of declarative contours: Three case studies of gay professionals. Journal of English Linguistics 39. 233–264.10.1177/0075424211405161Search in Google Scholar
Podesva, Robert J. 2011b. The California vowel shift and gay identity. American Speech 86. 32–51.10.1215/00031283-1277501Search in Google Scholar
Ravindranath, Maya. 2008. The effect of language shift on a sound change in progress. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 14(2). 139–147.Search in Google Scholar
Rickford, John R. & Faye McNair-Knox. 1994. Addressee-and topic-influenced style shift: A quantitative sociolinguistic study. In Biber, Douglas & Edward Finegan (eds.),Sociolinguistic perspectives on register, 235–276. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Rosenfelder, Ingrid, Josef Fruehwald, Keelan Evanini, Scott Seyfarth, Kyle Gorman, Hilary Prichard, & Jiahong Yuan. 2015. FAVE (Forced Alignment and Vowel Extraction) 1.1.3. ZENODO. doi:10.5281/zenodo.9846.Search in Google Scholar
Saisuwan, Pavadee. 2016. Male femininity in Thai among men who identify with non-normative male roles. Doctoral dissertation, Queen Mary University of London.Search in Google Scholar
Scarborough, Rebecca, Jason Brenier, Yuan Zhao, Lauren Hall-Lew & Olga Dmitrieva. 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.10.1121/1.4781735Search in Google Scholar
Schilling-Estes, Natalie. 2002. Investigating stylistic variation. In J.K. Chambers, Peter Trudgill & Natalie Schilling-Estes (eds.), The handbook of language variation and change, 375–401. Malden: Blackwell.10.1002/9780470756591.ch15Search in Google Scholar
Sharma, Devyani. 2011. Style repertoire and social change in British Asian English.Journal of Sociolinguistics 15(4). 464–492.10.1111/j.1467-9841.2011.00503.xSearch in Google Scholar
Silverstein, Michael. 2003. Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life. Language and Communication, 23(3–4). 193–229.10.1016/S0271-5309(03)00013-2Search in Google Scholar
Smiljanić, Rajka & Ann R. Bradlow. 2009. Speaking and hearing clearly: Talker and listener factors in speaking style changes. Language and Linguistics Compass 3(1). 236–264.10.1111/j.1749-818X.2008.00112.xSearch in Google Scholar
Stanford, James. 2010. The role of marriage in linguistic contact and variation: Two Hmong dialects in Texas. Journal of Sociolinguistics 14(1). 89–115.10.1111/j.1467-9841.2009.00436.xSearch in Google Scholar
Tseng, Amelia. 2015. Vowel variation, style, and identity construction in the English of Latinos in Washington, DC. Doctoral dissertation, Georgetown University.Search in Google Scholar
Tucker, Benjamin, Viktor Kharlamov, & Daniel Brenner. 2016. What’s the Zed? The acoustics of conversational fricatives in Mid-Western American English. Paper presented at NorthWest Phonetics and Phonology Conference 2016. University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon.Search in Google Scholar
Tuomainen, Outi, & Valerie Hazan. 2018. Investigating clear speech adaptations in spontaneous speech produced in communicative settings. In Mária Gósy & Tekla Etelka Gráczi (eds.), Challenges in Analysis and Processing of Spontaneous Speech, 9–25. Budapest: Research Institute for Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Nyelvtudományi Intézet.Search in Google Scholar
Van Hofwegen, Janneke. 2016. A day in the life: What self-recordings reveal about “everyday” language. Paper presented at NWAV 45, Vancouver, BC.Search in Google Scholar
Varon, Sara. 2007. Robot Dreams. New York: First Second.Search in Google Scholar
Wagner, Petra, Jürgen Trouvain & Frank Zimmerer. 2015. In defense of stylistic diversity in speech research. Journal of Phonetics 48. 1–12.10.1016/j.wocn.2014.11.001Search in Google Scholar
Weinberger, Steven H. & Stephen A. Kunath. 2011. The speech accent archive: Towards a typology of accents. Language and Computers-Studies in Practical Linguistics, 73(1). 265–281.Search in Google Scholar
Wittenburg, Peter, Hennie Brugman, Albert Russel, Alex Klassmann & Han Sloetjes. 2006. ELAN: A professional framework for multimodality research. Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), 1556–1559.Search in Google Scholar
Xu, Yi. 2010. In defense of lab speech. Journal of Phonetics, 38(3). 329–336.10.1016/j.wocn.2010.04.003Search in Google Scholar
© 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
