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Creaky, She Spoke: Examining f0, Vocal Creak, and Perceptions of Young Women’s Professionalism
Get PDFRecent sociolinguistic work on creak (also known as vocal fry, vocal creak, and creaky voice) has generally focused on its gendered use and perceptions, and more specifically on creak and young women. While Yuasa (2010) found creaky young women to be perceived as “educated, professional, and upwardly mobile” (p.316) sounding, Anderson et al. (2014) and Gallino and Pinto (2021) found the opposite in that creaky young women were perceived to be “less competent, less educated, less trustworthy, less attractive, and less hireable” (p.5). However, all of these works consider creak in isolation, eschewing analyses that examine creak in tandem with other linguistic variables. As voices are perceived as a whole unit, and not singular linguistic features, this leads to an incomplete understanding of the ways in which listeners might perceive creak differently when it is paired with other features such as f0, prosody, and phonetic variation related to dialect, etc. Work examining creak interacting with other linguistic features will provide better understanding for how, when, and why creak is perceived in specific ways by listeners. This study interrogates whether there is an interaction between f0 and creak that might affect professionalism perceptions of speakers and, additionally, how a listeners’ speech attitudes about women and creak might mediate f0 and creak’s effects on professionalism ratings. 125 participants rated stimuli produced by five young white women from the Midland region sourced from the Nationwide Speech Project corpus (Clopper and Pisoni 2004) on six Likert scales: professional, attractive, friendly, feminine, educated, and authoritative. Additionally, participants completed a set of workplace and women’s speech attitudes Likert scale measures (e.g., “to be successful in the workplace, young women should change how they speak to sound more professional”). The presence of creak in stimuli was determined via impressionistic listening and examining spectrograms in Praat. Factor analysis showed that ratings for the six traits patterned into two factors: “Competence” and “Warmth”. These two factors were used as dependent measures in linear mixed effects regression models, with average ratings for both factors as the dependent variables. The Competence model included main effects for Workplace Sexism attitudes (p\u3c.001) and f0 (p\u3c.01), but failed to reproduce findings from the aforementioned previous studies with regards to creak. This study supports previous work by Parker and Borie (2017) that calls for more nuanced and complex analyses of creak moving forward, and the need to move beyond attempting to examine creak as a variable in isolation. It also points to the possibility that the indeterminacy of previous findings on creak and social meaning can be attributed, in part, to differences in experimental design
Multiple Social Routes: Connecting Stance Accretion to Aggregate Variation
Get PDFConnecting individual-level stylizations to group patterns is a central concern of sociolinguistics (Eckert 2008, Labov 1963). One proposed route is through a process of accretion, where linguistic features used for stances like “toughness” or “friendliness” accrue over time to the identities of the speakers who use them, gaining higher-order indexical associations with group identities like “working class” or “Southern” (Eckert 2008). To test the hypothesis of stance accretion, this paper uses data from speakers from a single workplace in the U.S. South, where Southern features are currently receding. The overarching question is whether stance-level deployments of Southern linguistic features align with aggregate-level patterns. The dataset for this analysis is drawn from self-recorded audio collected by 16 workers of varying occupational levels at Southern Tech, a technology firm in the greater Raleigh, NC area. To gather audio data, each participant wore a recorder during their normal workday, resulting in a minimum of one hour of conversational data at work, as well as a minimum of one hour of conversational data from a casual setting. Acoustic analyses were conducted on vowels implicated in the SVS in the aggregate. In addition, three speakers with extensive self-recording data were selected to examine individuals’ token-level stylization, looking especially for statistical outliers (Van Hofwegen 2017). Aggregate-level results show that speakers who hold managerial positions within the firm show more Southern vowels, regardless of context. When looking at individuals’ highly stylized tokens, analysis shows that non-Southern vowels are deployed when speakers position themselves as professionals while in a work context. Southern vowels are deployed to indicate stances of friendliness in all recording contexts, but these never occur in interactions where authority or professionalism are required. These results suggest that indexical associations between the SVS and friendliness and professionalism may be driven by stance, but other local meanings, like managerial status at the firm, are not. Associations between Southern vowels and managerial positions may instead result from organizational-level practices (Rivera 2012), rather than stance-driven interactions. Implications are discussed for the mechanisms of maintenance and change for community-level patterns of social class
Conditioned Variation: Children Replicate Contrasts, not Parental Variant Rate
Get PDFOne of the fundamental questions within developmental sociolinguistics, and language acquisition research more broadly, has to do with children’s reaction to variability in their input or primary linguistic data (e.g. Labov 1989, Yang 2002, Hudson Kam and Newport 2005, Smith et al. 2009, Cournane and Pérez-Leroux 2020). As has been extensively documented, children overgeneralize and regularize both consistent (Marcus et al. 1992) and inconsistent (Hudson Kam and Newport 2005) input. Despite this tendency to go beyond the input, we do expect children to learn their caregivers’ dialect, and they have in fact been known to match the rates of variation found in their environment (Labov 1989, Johnson and White 2019). The literature therefore shows both regularization and matching, but under different circumstances. In this paper, we argue for a third scenario and present a case where children neither regularize nor match their caregiver. Instead, they replicate the systematic contrasts they encounter and regularize within matched conditions. This is what happens in the acquisition of Icelandic Dative Substitution (DS), a stigmatized but widespread instance of grammatically conditioned morphosyntactic variation. We investigated DS in 99 children aged 3–13 and their caregivers (80 dyads) by using forced-choice tasks and grammaticality judgments across multiple items as a proxy for case use. The results show that caregivers’ general DS rate did not predict the rate at which their children selected DS, regardless of age. On the other hand, when analyzing the data within conditioning factors, we found that children replicate the contrasts present in their caregivers’ speech, both at the group and individual level, and that this was in part dependent on age
Characteristics Of The U.s. Digital News Landscape: Trends And Patterns In Audience Behavior
No full textThis dissertation investigates the U.S. digital news landscape using audience behavioral trace data from 2017 to 2021. In particular, the study combines Web browsing histories and self-reported demographic attributes to characterize 804 digital news domains and document changes in their audience consumption. Three main themes organize the findings: ideology, localness, and inequality. Focusing on ideology, the dissertation suggests that the U.S. digital news landscape did not grow more polarized during the studied period, and audience engagement on ideologically extreme news domains exhibits both reassuring and concerning patterns. Visitors spend less time on these long-tail domains but extremely conservative domains act as rabbit holes that trap audiences who are more likely to vote. Focusing on localness, the dissertation provides a new measure to quantify local news and presents several characteristics of digital local news domains. Local news domains lose audiences to national outlets during elections, their localness declined from 2017 to 2021, and their audience base became more conservative during the studied period. Focusing on inequality, the dissertation documents sharp demographic disparities in who consumes news, and finds that mobile access attenuates some---but not all---forms of inequalities in terms of web access and news consumption. Audiences reading news on mobile devices are more White and educated, but less affluent and politically engaged. Moving beyond static descriptions of news domains, the dissertation utilizes and develops monthly measures, provides longitudinal evidence, and advances the media sociology approach to news consumption by showing that the domain-audience duality is a dynamic process that can be affected by geography, ideology, technology, and social class. Overall, the dissertation leverages an unprecedentedly large dataset on audience behavior and uncovers trends and patterns on how the U.S. digital news landscape has changed in the past four years
Eastern Resentment: Explaining Political Dissatisfaction In Eastern Germany
No full textHow can we explain the persisting salience of the East-West divide in Germany more than three decades after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc? The present dissertation seeks to answer this question by exploring various determinants of dissatisfaction in contemporary Eastern Germany. In this work, I make the case that patterns of political disenchantment in the former German socialist states are partially attributable to contextual factors. In each chapter, I test a different contextual effect as a covariate of regional dissatisfaction: inter-group contacts (Chapter 2), framing (Chapter 3) and windfall income (Chapter 4). Results are obtained using descriptive, experimental and quasi-experimental methods on data from the Wahl Navi Electoral Compass, the Facebook Connectedness Index, two online population-based surveys and the German Socio-Economic Panel dataset. Findings suggest that inter-group contacts, framing and windfall income all have a substantive effect on regional resentment in Eastern German states. These results indicate that regional discontent in Germany is not solely fueled by low socioeconomic standings or by a backlash response to immigration, but is rather the consequence of multiple coocurring effects
Human Dimensions Of Building Performance: Sensing, Modeling, And Predicting Indoor Environmental Quality
Get PDFThe indoor environment critically affects occupant health and comfort, especially since humans spend most of the day indoors. Meanwhile, occupant activities, preferences, and behaviors may contribute to a significant amount of building energy consumption. The focus of environmental buildings shifted from automated systems to a paradigm of collective environmental design since the second half of the 20th century, emphasizing human dimensions in building performance, which allows occupants to participate as active/passive actuators and sensors. Concurrently, increased environmental awareness further spurred the green building movement intending to encourage more high-performance buildings. The question remains as to whether high-performance buildings are also healthy buildings. This dissertation aims to cast new light on how environmental design and building systems work for people as well as how building sensors and human senses work together to inform the organization and optimization of various performance targets such as sustainability, public health, and resiliency. Special attention is given to the non-visual environment attempting to facilitate human-in-the-loop of the building design and operation processes. In order to achieve this goal, environmental monitoring, data analysis, and human subject recruitments are developed to characterize the human dimension of building performance
Penn Library\u27s LJS 431 - Manuscript list of manuscript and printed books (Video Orientation)
No full texthttps://repository.upenn.edu/sims_video/1178/thumbnail.jp
Importing Development: The Chinese Nationalists\u27 Embrace of Jewish Settlement Plans During World War II
Get PDFKorean Case Stacking and the Nominal Template
Get PDFKorean exhibits a phenomenon known as case stacking, where a single nominal can bear two markers traditionally associated with case. We show that while the inner markers in stacked nominals reflect genuine case, the outer markers are instead associated with discourse marking. Stacked “nominative” and “accusative” are in fact focus markers, whose distributions are distinct from those of genuine case marking (Schütze 2001). We propose that the inner markers are associated with the argument introducing heads Voice and Appl, and the outer markers are associated with focus and topic. By assigning inner markers low and outer markers high, our analysis derives the templatic ordering of morphemes in Korean nominals (Cho & Sells 1995) and explains the difference in distribution of honorific nominative (HON.NOM) and plain nominative (NOM). Our analysis that only external argument introducing heads (Voice and Appl) can assign honorific-sensitive case markers captures an independent fact about Korean: the case paradigm contains HON.NOM and HON.DAT but no *HON.ACC