Sound Change in General American: an Acoustic Analysis of Vowel Production in Female Californian Speakers.

Abstract

[eng] The term “General American English” used by Peterson & Barney (1952) has been regarded to be inaccessible as multiple differences in language production across America have been recorded and studied since then (Hagiwara 1997, 658). The present study focuses on Southern Californian English vowel production by exploring the current status of some of its inhabitants’ vowels. Details of the acoustic features and the distributions of vowels produced by different native speakers of Southern Californian English (SCE) in citation disyllables in which the vowels are followed by bilabial stops will be presented, and a comparison between them will be drawn. The results of these comparisons reveal differences in the formant frequencies of specific vowels between today’s Southern Californian English and the Californian English spoken 23 years ago. These dissimilarities served me to see whether the results of this study are in agreement with the California Vowel Shift. The main focus will be on the segments /ʊ/ and /ə/ which, after analyzing the spectral features of the vowels, seem to be going through a change in their production in Southern California as compared to Hagiwara’s study carried out 23 years prior to this present paper.