Cui, Naomi and Zhu, Minyi and Law, Vina and Tse, Holman and Nagy, Naomi
(2014)
Exploring automated formant analysis for comparative variationist study of Heritage Cantonese and English.
In: Change and Variation in Canada / Changement et Variation au Canada (CVC 8), 31 May 2014 - 31 May 2014, Queen's University, Kingston, ON, Canada.
Abstract
We consider the possibility of Cantonese and English reciprocally influencing vowel space in Toronto’s Heritage Cantonese community by comparing Generation1 and Generation2 speakers in both languages. We predict more English-like patterns in Gen2 Cantonese (vs. Gen1) and more Cantonese-like patterns in Gen1 English (vs. Gen2). Methodological innovations include automated forced alignment and formant extraction for Cantonese -- methods increasingly used for English data but not frequently applied to other languages in sociolinguistics. Extension to additional languages provides testing grounds for sociolinguistic generalizations which have been based primarily on English, French and Spanish. FAVE (Rosenfelder et al. 2011) was used to force-align English transcripts to the corresponding .wav. Cantonese transcripts were force-aligned in ProsodyLab (Gorman et al. 2011), using unsupervised machine learning to train acoustic models, customizable for non-English data (unlike FAVE). FAVE was used to extract and normalize English formant measurements (F1, F2) at each vowel midpoint. A custom Praat script did the same for Cantonese. Data consists of ~40,000 measured vowels for each language: all stressed vowels produced by 10 speakers per language during a 1-hour interview. This paper focuses on ~9,000 tokens of /i/. Preliminary results from mixed-effects modeling: o Generation and sex are main effects in Cantonese for both F1 and F2, but only for F2 in English → As predicted; Gen1 speakers haven’t fully acquired social conditioning in English. Contra predictions, Gen2 sustains Gen1-like social conditioning in Cantonese. o As in Homeland Cantonese (Yue-Hashimoto 1972:158), Heritage Cantonese /i/ shows a centralizing effect of following velars; stronger in Gen1 than Gen2 → supports our hypothesis. Neither generation transfers this effect to English. o Without any human correction, the automatically extracted and measured data behaves much as expected → a promising avenue for further investigation. Comparisons to Toronto Anglo English (Boberg 2008, Roeder & Jarmasz 2010, Roeder 2012) will be reported.
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| Item Type: |
Conference or Workshop Item
(Paper)
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| Creators/Authors: |
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| Date: |
31 May 2014 |
| Date Type: |
Publication |
| Access Restriction: |
No restriction; Release the ETD for access worldwide immediately. |
| Event Title: |
Change and Variation in Canada / Changement et Variation au Canada (CVC 8) |
| Event Dates: |
31 May 2014 - 31 May 2014 |
| Event Type: |
Conference |
| Institution: |
University of Pittsburgh |
| Refereed: |
No |
| Official URL: |
http://cvc8.org/abstracts/ |
| Date Deposited: |
26 Oct 2015 15:55 |
| Last Modified: |
18 Jun 2019 05:55 |
| URI: |
http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/id/eprint/26261 |
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