Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-wg55d Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-17T16:43:57.078Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

TH-stopping in Philadelphia Puerto Rican English

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 February 2024

Abigail E. Patchell  and
Grant M. Berry
Abigail E. Patchell
Affiliation:
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Villanova University, Villanova, PA, USA
Grant M. Berry*
Affiliation:
Department of Spanish, Villanova University, Villanova, PA, USA
*
Corresponding author: Grant M. Berry. Email: grant.berry@villanova.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Analyzing data from the Puerto Rican English in Philadelphia (PREP) corpus, we investigate participation in TH-stopping, a socially stigmatized yet stable variable documented in Philadelphia. While previous studies have been impressionistic and have considered voiced and voiceless tokens to pattern together, this work validates novel, acoustically based stopping indices: mean harmonics-to-noise ratio for voiced tokens and skewness for voiceless tokens. We apply these indices to the corpus data and analyze stopping under a Bayesian framework, and we compare results from a model built from impressionistic coding of a subset of the same data. We find convergent evidence that TH-stopping is a stable variable in the Puerto Rican English data as well. Findings are compared with those of existing studies, noting future directions for research on the variable and underscoring the importance of establishing demographically representative baselines for linguistic research in diverse urban centers.

Keywords

TH-stoppingstable variableacoustic phoneticsminority speech
Type
Research Article
Information
Language Variation and Change , Volume 36 , Issue 1 , March 2024 , pp. 73 - 93
Check for updates
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Arnau, Ariel. (2012). The evolution of leadership within the Puerto Rican community of Philadelphia, 1950s-1970s. The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 136(1):53–81.10.5215/pennmaghistbio.136.1.0053CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berry, Grant M. (2018). Liminal Voices, Central Constraints: Minority Adoption of Majority Sound Change. Doctoral dissertation, The Pennsylvania State University.Google Scholar
Berry, Grant M. (2022). Language variation and change in Puerto Rican Philadelphia. https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/7KM4R.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brown, Esther L. (2018). Cumulative exposure to phonetic reducing environments marks the lexicon: Spanish /d-/ words spoken in isolation. In Aaron Smith, K. & Nordquist, D. (Eds.), Functional and Usage-based Approached to the Study of Language: In Honor of Joan L. Bybee. New York: John Benjamins. 127–153.10.1075/slcs.192.06broCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brown, Esther L., & Raymond, William D. (2012). How discourse shapes the lexicon: Explaining the distribution of Spanish f-/h- words. Diachronica 29(2):139–161.10.1075/dia.29.2.02broCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Casellas, Marisa. (2007). El Barrio: Latino relationships in North Philadelphia and impacts on Puerto Rican businesses. Urban Studies Seminar Papers 1:1–39.Google Scholar
Eckert, Penelope. (1989). The whole woman: Sex and gender differences in variation. Language Variation and Change 1:245–267.10.1017/S095439450000017XCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ericksen, Eugene P. (1985). The state of Puerto Rican Philadelphia. Philadelphia: Institute for Public Policy Research.Google Scholar
Erker, Daniel. (2010). A subsegmental approach to coda /s/ weakening in Dominican Spanish. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 203:9–26.Google Scholar
File-Muriel, Richard J., & Brown, Earl K. (2011). The gradient nature of s-lenition in Caleño Spanish. Language Variation and Change 23:223–243.10.1017/S0954394511000056CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fisher, Sabriya. (2022). The status of ain’t in Philadelphia African American English. Language Variation and Change 34:1–28.10.1017/S0954394522000060CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gabry, Jonah, & Veen, Duco (2022). shinystan: Interactive visual and numerical diagnostics and posterior analysis for Bayesian models. R package version 2.6.0.Google Scholar
Gahl, Susanne. (2008). Time and thyme are not homophones: The effect of lemma frequency on word durations in spontaneous speech. Language 84(3):474–496.10.1353/lan.0.0035CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goodrich, Ben, Gabry, Jonah, Ali, Imad, & Brilleman, Sam. (2023). rstanarm: Bayesian applied regression modeling via Stan. R package version 2.21.4.Google Scholar
Gylfadottir, Duna. (2015). Shtreets of Philadelphia: An acoustic study of /str/-retraction in a naturalistic speech corpus. University of Penn Working Papers in Linguistics 21(2):.Google Scholar
Kruschke, John K. (2018). Rejecting or accepting parameter values in Bayesian estimation. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science 1(2):270–280.10.1177/2515245918771304CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Labov, William. (2001). Principles of Linguistic Change, Volume 2: Social Factors. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Labov, William. (2014). The role of African Americans in Philadelphia sound change. Language Variation and Change 26:1–20.10.1017/S0954394513000240CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Labov, William, Cohen, Paul, Robins, Clarence, & Lewis, John. (1968). A study of the non-standard English of Negro and Puerto Rican Speakers in New York City. Cooperative Research Report 3288. Vols I and II. Philadelphia: U.S. Regional Survey (Linguistics Laboratory, University of PA).Google Scholar
Labov, William, Rosenfelder, Ingrid, & Fruehwald, Josef. (2013). One hundred years of sound change in Philadelphia: Linear incrementation, reversal, and reanalysis. Language 89:30–65.10.1353/lan.2013.0015CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Makowski, Dominique, Ben-Shachar, Mattan S., & Lüdecke, Daniele. (2019). bayestestR: Describing effects and their uncertainty, existence and significance within the Bayesian framework. Journal of Open Source Software 4(40):. R package version 0.12.1.10.21105/joss.01541CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mathôt, Sebastiaan, & March, Jennifer. (2022). Conducting linguistic experiments online with OpenSesame and OSWeb. Language Learning 72(4):1017–1048.10.1111/lang.12509CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mathôt, Sebastiaan, Schreij, Daniel, & Theeuwes, Jan. (2012). OpenSesame: An open-source, graphical experiment builder for the social sciences. Behavior Research Methods 44(2):314–324.10.3758/s13428-011-0168-7CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mitterer, Holger, & Ernestsus, Mirjam. (2006). Listeners recover /t/s that speakers reduce: Evidence from /t/-lenition in Dutch. Journal of Phonetics 34:73–103.10.1016/j.wocn.2005.03.003CrossRefGoogle Scholar
O’Connor, Kathleen M. (2001). When is a cluster not a cluster? Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics 15(1–2):53–56.10.3109/02699200109167630CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Poplack, Shana. (1978). Dialect acquisition among Puerto Rican bilinguals. Language in Society 7:89–103.10.1017/S0047404500005340CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Purse, Ruaridh. (2020). The envelope of variation for /l/ vocalization in Philadelphia. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 25(2):.Google Scholar
R Core Team. (2023). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing. Vienna, Austria. Version 4.3.1 ‘Beagle Scouts’.Google Scholar
Read, Charles. (1973). Children’s judgment of phonetic similarities in relation to English spelling. Language Learning 23:17–38.10.1111/j.1467-1770.1973.tb00095.xCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Resnick, Melvyn C. (1972). The redundant English phonemes /č,ǰ,š,ž/. Linguistics 10(86):83–86.10.1515/ling.1972.10.86.83CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ribeiro, Alyssa (2022). Puerto Rican Migration. Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia.Google Scholar
Rosenfelder, Ingrid, Fruehwald, Josef, Evanini, Keelan, Seyfarth, Scott, Gorman, Kyle, Prichard, Hilary, & Yuan, Jiahong. (2022). FAVE (Forced Alignment and Vowel Extraction) Program Suite v2.0.0/zenodo.Google Scholar
Ryant, Neville, & Liberman, Mark. (2017). Large-scale analysis of Spanish /s/-lenition using audiobooks. Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics 28:.Google Scholar
Santa Ana, Otto, & Parodi, Claudia. (1998). Modeling the speech community: Configuration and variable types in the Mexican Spanish setting. Language in Society 27:23–51.Google Scholar
Shousterman, Cara. (2014). Speaking English in Spanish Harlem: The Role of Rhythm. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 20:159–168.Google Scholar
Sneller, Betsy. (2020). Phonological rule spreading across hostile lines: (TH)-fronting in Grays Ferry. Language Variation and Change 32(1):25–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sneller, Betsy, Fruehwald, Josef, & Yang, Charles. (2019). Using the Tolerance Principle to predict phonological change. Language Variation and Change 31(1):1–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thomas, Erik. (2007). Phonological and phonetic characteristics of African American Vernacular English. Language and Linguistics Compass 1:450–475.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
U.S. Census Bureau. (2020a). Table B17001I: Poverty status in the last 12 months by sex and age (Hispanic or Latino). 2020 ACS 5-year Estimates detailed tables.Google Scholar
U.S. Census Bureau. (2020b). Table B17001H: Poverty status in the last 12 months by sex and age (White alone, not Hispanic or Latino). 2020 ACS 5-year Estimates detailed tables.Google Scholar
U.S. Census Bureau. (2020c). Table B17001B: Poverty status in the last 12 months by sex and age (Black or African American alone). 2020 ACS 5-year Estimates detailed tables.Google Scholar
U.S. Census Bureau. (2021). QuickFacts. Philadelphia, PA. Available at https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/philadelphiacitypennsylvania/PST045221.Google Scholar
Villarreal, Dan, Clark, Lynn, Hay, Jennifer, & Watson, Kevin. (2020). From categories to gradience: Auto-coding sociophonetic variation with random forests. Laboratory Phonology 11:1–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wagner, Suzanne Evans. (2014). Linguistic correlates of Irish-American and Italian-American ethnicity in high school and beyond. Language and Communication 35:75–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weinreich, Uriel, Labov, William, & Herzog, Marvin I. (1968). Empirical foundations for a theory of language change. In Lehmann, W. P., and Malkiel, Yakov (Eds.), Directions for Historical Linguistics. Austin: University of Texas Press. 95–195.Google Scholar
Weldon, Tracey. (2021). Middle Class African American English. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Whalen, Carmen Teresa. (2001). From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia: Puerto Rican Workers and Postwar Economies. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Wolfram, Walt. (1971). Overlapping Influence and Linguistic Assimilation in Second Generation Puerto Ricans. Paper presented at the American Anthropological Association 1971 Meeting. New York, New York.Google Scholar
Wolfram, Walt. (1974). Sociolinguistic Aspects of Assimilation: Puerto Rican English in New York City. Arlington, VA: Center for Applied Linguistics.Google Scholar
Wood, Simon N. (2003). Thin plate regression splines. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series B (Statistical Methodology) 65(1):95–114.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zellou, Georgia, & Tamminga, Meredith. (2014). Nasal coarticulation changes over time in Philadelphia English. Journal of Phonetics 47:18–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zhao, Sherry. (2010). Stop-like modification of the dental fricative /ð/: An acoustic analysis. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 128:2009–2020.CrossRefGoogle Scholar