Linguistic styles, social dialects and tempo

Henrietta Cedergren

Fri. 2:00-4:05 A

Quantitative correlational studies in sociolinguistic research have demonstrated the importance of situational context and speaker characteristics in accounting for variation in vernacular speech, and, thus, have provided empirical content to the concepts of linguistic styles and social dialects. In particular, casual unguarded speech has been revealed to be the privileged milieu for the examination of natural stable or on-going change processes because the incidence of variable phonological features increases in this speech style. It has also been assumed that casual speech is correlated with an increase in tempo of delivery. In contrast, accounts of social dialects concentrate on the distribution of distinct phonological processes as linguistic cues of differentiation. Little is known about the relations between observed properties of timing and socio-symbolic differences among speakers.

The study we will be reporting is concerned with the analysis of temporal organization in speech. It attempts to address the issue of the relation between tempo and social dialects. This is a complex task because of the multidimensional properties of communication. Observed patterns of timing may follow from properties of the linguistic text, i.e. segmental and prosodic organization features (Lehiste 1975; Beckman & Edwards 1990; Campbell 1992), properties of the informational content, i.e. the flow of information in discourse (Bruce & Touati 1992; Van Santen 1992), or properties of the context, i.e. citation vs. spontaneous speech forms (Lindblom 1990). We will present an analysis of syllable timing in speech corpora using three minute excerpts extracted from sociolinguistic interviews of sixteen speakers of Montreal French differentiated according to age, sex and social status. Speaker ages correspond to two generational categories: twenty to twenty-five years of age or fifty-five and over; an equal number of working class and middle class speakers were selected. Regression and cluster analyses of the data are presented. They reveal that interspeaker differences are strongly related, among other factors, to speech tempo and that speaker groupings are associated to both age and social status.

References

Beckman, M. & J. Edwards (1990), Lengthening and shortening and the nature of prosodic constituency, Papers in laboratory phonology I: between the grammar and the physics of speech, ed. by J. Kingston & M. Beckman, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. pp. 152-178.

Bruce, G. & P. Touati (1992), On the analysis of prosody in spontaneous speech with exemplifications from Swedish and French, Speech Communication 11, pp. 453-458.

Campbell, W.N. (1992), Multi-level Timing in Speech, Unpublished PhD Thesis, Sussex University, Department of Experimental Psychology.

Lindblom, B. (1990), Explaining phonetic variation: A sketch of the H & H theory, in Speech Production and Speech Modelling, ed. by W. Hardcastle and A. Marchal, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, pp. 403-439.

Lehiste, I. (1975), The phonetic structure of paragraphs, Structure and Process in Speech Perception, ed. by A. Cohen & S. Nooteboom, Springer, Berlin. pp. 195-206.

Van Santen, J.P.H. (1992), Contextual Effects on Vowel Duration, Speech Communication February 1992.