Title
Student Major/Year in School
Mathematics & Statistics, 4th year
Faculty Mentor Information
Mary Kohn, Department of English, College of Arts & Sciences
Abstract
The Sound Change Across Kansas: PEN/PIN Merger
Isaiah Solorzano, Mary Kohn
Department of English
College of Arts & Sciences
Mergers, a sound change that present themselves in the background of everyday conversations, usually going unnoticed and uninterrupted across speech communities. I am interested in the sound change of short vowels found in word pairs like pen-pin, shown to be changing [1]. In 2014, Strelluf suggested the low-back merger is present in Kansas City due, in part, to a large initial population of South Midland speakers. This study indicates the merger should be advancing [1]. We do not understand, entirely, how or why sound changes. The merged vowel sound /i/ is starting to occupy the space the vowel sound /ɛ/ occupies. This project builds on Strelluf’s insights of sound change, in Kansas City, by 1) empirically exploring data to detect changes in Kansas, and 2) framing issues in a broader sense to understand how this dialect has arose, using a structural and social explanation.
The data comes from sociolinguistic interviews which are recorded informal conversations between the researcher and participants. The independent variables include gender, age, class, and ethnic group. The dependent variables include formant frequencies F1 and F2, stress, duration, and other linguistic variables. We use a sample population of 30 subjects. The data has been measured with Forced Alignment and Vowel Extraction (FAVE), an automatic extraction technique [1][2]. I predict that men and the working class are leaders of this change, coinciding with Strelluf, but going against standard hypothesis over mergers in the field today.
- Strelluf, C. (2014). We have such a normal, non-accented voice: a sociophonetic study of English in Kansas City(Doctoral dissertation, University of Missouri--Columbia).
- Severance, N., Evanini, K., & Dinkin, A. (2016). Examining the reliability of automated vowel analyses using FAVE. In NorthWest Phonetics & Phonology Conference (pp. 13-15).
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
Recommended Citation
Solorzano, Isaiah (2019). "The PIN/PEN Merger," Kansas State University Undergraduate Research Conference. https://newprairiepress.org/ksuugradresearch/2019/posters/5
Included in
Anthropological Linguistics and Sociolinguistics Commons, Comparative and Historical Linguistics Commons, Phonetics and Phonology Commons
The PIN/PEN Merger
The Sound Change Across Kansas: PEN/PIN Merger
Isaiah Solorzano, Mary Kohn
Department of English
College of Arts & Sciences
Mergers, a sound change that present themselves in the background of everyday conversations, usually going unnoticed and uninterrupted across speech communities. I am interested in the sound change of short vowels found in word pairs like pen-pin, shown to be changing [1]. In 2014, Strelluf suggested the low-back merger is present in Kansas City due, in part, to a large initial population of South Midland speakers. This study indicates the merger should be advancing [1]. We do not understand, entirely, how or why sound changes. The merged vowel sound /i/ is starting to occupy the space the vowel sound /ɛ/ occupies. This project builds on Strelluf’s insights of sound change, in Kansas City, by 1) empirically exploring data to detect changes in Kansas, and 2) framing issues in a broader sense to understand how this dialect has arose, using a structural and social explanation.
The data comes from sociolinguistic interviews which are recorded informal conversations between the researcher and participants. The independent variables include gender, age, class, and ethnic group. The dependent variables include formant frequencies F1 and F2, stress, duration, and other linguistic variables. We use a sample population of 30 subjects. The data has been measured with Forced Alignment and Vowel Extraction (FAVE), an automatic extraction technique [1][2]. I predict that men and the working class are leaders of this change, coinciding with Strelluf, but going against standard hypothesis over mergers in the field today.
- Strelluf, C. (2014). We have such a normal, non-accented voice: a sociophonetic study of English in Kansas City(Doctoral dissertation, University of Missouri--Columbia).
- Severance, N., Evanini, K., & Dinkin, A. (2016). Examining the reliability of automated vowel analyses using FAVE. In NorthWest Phonetics & Phonology Conference (pp. 13-15).
