Write-up directions at the end.

In this project, you will try to find out about the phonology of word-final flapping in the speech of a research participant. You will elicit and record speech, transcribe the “t”s in your data, and post the data you collect on your blog page. Look here for further details as we build this project together.

We decided in class on 9/25 that we would use three methods for elicitation. One group will have their participants read and rehearse sentences, recording a relatively natural post-rehearsal version. Another group will elicit the phrases using questions that prompt the desired phrases. The third group will give their participants the phrases, and ask them to form sentences.

Here are the papers that I mentioned in class when we were discussing methodology:

Evans, Zoë  and Catherine Watson. 2002. Flapping in three varieties of English. Proceedings of the 9th Australian International Conference on Speech Science & Technology Melbourne, December 2 to 5, 2002. (Uses a question and answer methodology).

Eddington, David and Michael Taylor. 2009. T-Glottalization in American English. American Speech 84, 3, 298-314. (Uses a repetition methodology, and is the source of some of the sentences we tried out in class together. Also makes claims about front vs. back vowels, and east vs. west region)

We also decided we would study the variables of region (west vs. east coast, western vs. eastern MA?), and the following vocalic context. We worked in class 9/27 on constructing phrases for our experimental items. Here are the edited results:

eat apples, eat oatmeal, eat alike

meet Eddy, meet owners, meet Elise

brought inside, brought outside, brought along

bought insects, bought awnings, bought alarms

taught evil, taught awful, taught alone

In classes 9/30 and 10/2, the three (one split into two, so four) groups fleshed out their plans, constructing sentences, questions prompts, etc. and deciding on other methodological details. Everyone agreed that the items should be randomized across subjects. Each student committed to finding a speaker from either Eastern or Western Mass, or the West Coast.

For Wednesday October 9th, everyone will:

1.Get informed consonant from their research participant. Give them the information specified on this page, get their explicit consent to participate under those conditions, and make sure you tell them they can stop the experiment at any time. Also make sure to ask whether they mind if their anonymous recordings can be put on a publicly accessible web page. If not, ask if they mind if the recording is shared with other classmates and teachers (you must then use a password to protect the blog page). If they do not want the recording to be shared at all, then thank them for considering, and find another participant.

2. Record their speaker using whatever device is the best/most convenient. Record directly into Praat, or make sure that you’ll be able to make a version of your recording done elsewhere that you can import into Praat.

3. Normalize the intensity of their entire recording in Praat (Modify > Scale intensity – leave at default value of 70 dB)

4. Splice out the entire sentences containing the target word pairs, as well as the word pairs themselves, and create .wav or .aiff files.

5. Post each of these files, separately linked using the word pair or sentence as the title, to a blog page. If you do multiple recordings, use a separate blog page for each one. If you convert your .wav or .aiff files to mpeg (can be done in i-tunes using File > Create New Version), then you can post them to the blog using “add media”. For some reason, .wav and .aiff files are banned from the blogs. You can also upload your files to a server (you have space on the u-drive, and on the web server), and link to the files from the blog.

Please give the files in the order above, which is also the order on the google form (see step 6), with each word pair followed by its sentence, e.g.:

eat apples    John likes to eat apples in autumn.

6. Use this google form to submit the link to your blog page(s), password(s) if necessary, and their judgment of how the “t” was realized in each item.

Write-up

The write-up will present our experiment, including the results. I calculated the results by averaging over the transcriber’s judgments, and then by averaging over the sentences of each type. So in the tables below, “Eat apples” refers to “Eat apples”, “meet Eddy”, and the four others with stressed front vowels starting the second word, “Eat oatmeal” to the set of words starting with non-front stressed vowels, and “Eat alike” to the words starting with unstressed vowels.

Here are the results, first in terms of proportion glottal, and then in terms of proportion flap (proportions can be translated to percentages: 0.27 = 27%). If you added these together, and subtracted from 1, you would get the proportion of [t] transcriptions. The results are divided in both tables by region. The “all” number is a little higher than the total of the others because 4 speakers were not labeled for region.

Glottal	Eat apples	Eat oatmeal	Eat alike
W.Coast  (n=10)	0.27	0.29	0.18
E. MA (n=15)	0.38	0.33	0.22
W. MA (n=4)	0.48	0.43	0.38
All (n=33)	0.36	0.35	0.22
Flap	Eat apples	Eat oatmeal	Eat alike
W.Coast  (n=10)	0.20	0.16	0.31
E. MA (n=15)	0.25	0.24	0.38
W. MA (n=4)	0.13	0.12	0.25
All (n=33)	0.22	0.19	0.34

Your paper should be between 750 – 1250 words, and should include the four sections indicated in the grading rubric.

Grading rubric

Style /5

1. Includes appropriate sections (optional sub-sections). /1

2. Free of typos and grammatical errors. /2

2. No overly colloquial writing, but also no use of “flowery” vocabulary just to impress, or as filler. /2

Content /10

1.Background /2

Clear, concise summary of earlier literature and relevance to this study. Cite at least two previous studies. These will usually be the two studies at the top of the page. Clear unambiguous statement of at least two hypotheses, at least one phonological, and one regional.

2. Methods /3

Accurate description of how the data were collected. Try to state this in an academic style – not:

“Prof. Pater gave us files to transcribe.” But instead:

“Each instance of a potential flap was transcribed by at least two independent raters….”

3. Results /3

Clear and accurate presentation of some of the quantitative data, and some of your own observations about the data, *in terms of their relationship to the hypotheses*. Discuss the results in terms of how they relate to the hypotheses you focus on. For example, if your hypothesis about phonological contexts doesn’t differentiate amongst regions, you would want to present the data from the bottom “all” row. And you would only present the data as proportion flap and proportion glottal if your hypothesis was stated so as to make predictions about both.

4. Discussion /2

Insightful discussion of the relationship of the results to previous literature explaining whether they support earlier observations or go in a different direction, and of any new conclusions that can be drawn.

Write this up on a blog page, and submit the link by midnight Monday December 16th on this google form.