The acoustic study of consonants has lagged considerably behind that of vowels. While a robust literature exists about vowel shifting, vowel quality, and the sociolinguistic significance of vowels, comparable literature is lacking for the acoustic quality of liquids. This study seeks to supplement the acoustic studies of vowels by analyzing characteristics of the liquid /l/ in its word-initial context. Traditionally, phonologists have subdivided /l/ into two allophones: dark and light, although current analysis has characterized these distinctions as gradient, not discrete. Word-initial /l/ is thought to be the canonically lightest variant of the phoneme, but cross-dialectal research has shown great acoustic variance in its phonetic realization. This case study aims to trace the phoneme through three generations of Chicano English speakers from South Texas, and to draw conclusions about how its variation among speakers and generations can shed light on other sociolinguistic phenomena, such as the persistence of substrate features from Spanish (with its characteristically light /l/s) or assimilation into mainstream American English dialects (with their characteristically dark /l/s). The study shows that there is indeed significant shift in the lightness of /l/ — independent of phonetic context — across the generations of speakers under examination. This result supports other studies that show notable assimilation with Anglo English varieties in earlier generations, but robust use of ethnically-marked phonological features among recent generations.
2018. Asymmetrical interlingual influence in the production of Spanish and English laterals as a result of competing activation in bilingual language processing. Journal of Phonetics 69 ► pp. 12 ff.
Asch, Madeline & Franny D. Brogan
2023. Uptalk in Chicano Southern California English. American Speech: A Quarterly of Linguistic Usage 98:3 ► pp. 264 ff.
Barlow, Jessica A.
2014. Age of acquisition and allophony in Spanish-English bilinguals. Frontiers in Psychology 5
Bayley, Robert & Dan Villarreal
2019. Coronal Stop Deletion in a Rural South Texas Community. In Mexican American English, ► pp. 198 ff.
Callahan, Erin
2019. Morphosyntactic Variation. In Mexican American English, ► pp. 243 ff.
2017. Tracking the phonological status of /l/ in Newfoundland English: Experiments in articulation and acoustics. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 142:1 ► pp. 350 ff.
Hansen Edwards, Jette G.
2024. Social Factors and L2 Phonetics and Phonology,
Kendall, Tyler S. & Erik R. Thomas
2019. Variable (ING). In Mexican American English, ► pp. 171 ff.
Kohn, Mary E.
2019. Latino English in New Destinations: Processes of Regionalization in Emerging Contact Varieties*. In Mexican American English, ► pp. 268 ff.
Schouten, Belinda Treviño & Erik R. Thomas
2019. The Context of North Town. In Mexican American English, ► pp. 40 ff.
Thomas, Erik R.
2013. Phonetic Analysis in Sociolinguistics. In Research Methods in Sociolinguistics, ► pp. 119 ff.
Thomas, Erik R.
2013. Sociophonetics. In The Handbook of Language Variation and Change, ► pp. 108 ff.
Thomas, Erik R.
2016. Sociophonetics of Consonantal Variation. Annual Review of Linguistics 2:1 ► pp. 95 ff.
Erik R. Thomas
2019. Mexican American English,
Thomas, Erik R.
2019. Language Contact, Immigration, and Latino Englishes. In Mexican American English, ► pp. 1 ff.
Thomas, Erik R.
2019. Trends from Outside. In Mexican American English, ► pp. 125 ff.
Thomas, Erik R.
2019. Mexican American English and Dialect Genesis. In Mexican American English, ► pp. 294 ff.
Thomas, Erik R.
2019. Vowels in North Town. In Mexican American English, ► pp. 93 ff.
Thomas, Erik R.
2020. Sociophonetic trends in studies of Southern U.S. English. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 147:1 ► pp. 529 ff.
Thomas, Erik R. & Janneke Van Hofwegen
2019. Consonantal Variables Correlated with Ethnicity. In Mexican American English, ► pp. 61 ff.
Thomas, Erik R. & Tyler S. Kendall
2019. Prosody. In Mexican American English, ► pp. 215 ff.
Thomas, Erik R. & Belinda T. Schouten
2019. Social Evaluation of Variables. In Mexican American English, ► pp. 149 ff.
Turton, Danielle & Maciej Baranowski
2021. The sociolinguistics of /l/ in Manchester. Linguistics Vanguard 7:1
[no author supplied]
2013. Reference Guide for Varieties of English. In A Dictionary of Varieties of English, ► pp. 363 ff.
[no author supplied]
2019. Index. In Mexican American English, ► pp. 350 ff.
[no author supplied]
2021. Sociophonetics and Its Methods. In Sociophonetics, ► pp. 12 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 29 march 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
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