Author: cvaughn

Jordan Harden

Posted on by cvaughn

Eh Braddah, Howzit?! No, that’s not a massive typo; it’s a greeting in Hawaiian Pidgin English. Different from the Native Hawaiian language, Hawaiian Pidgin English developed as a result of Hawai’i becoming a melting pot of immigrant populations; Chinese, Portuguese, and Filipino immigrants created a means of communication with one another, as well as with Native Hawaiian peoples, by creating a Creole language of their own (Roberts 1998). Many immigrants arrived in order to work in plantations, which demanded a great deal of laborers after becoming monetized by American missionaries. Because of the imbalanced power dynamic that then erupted, and because of the rich history of immigration behind the creation of this language, I believe that it is important to remain conscious of our attitudes and behaviors towards speakers of Hawaiian Pidgin English. Furthermore, I believe it is essential to be conscious of societal and personal attitudes towards speakers of any dialect that has origins in cultures of outrightly imbalanced social power, forced labor, immigration, and/or colonization.

Throughout history, discriminatory language practices have found their place in the workplace, in educational institutions, in social interactions, and in society at large. Language discrimination, however, is often viewed as an excusable practice, separate from outright prejudice or racism. Of course, this is a false belief that allows harmful behaviors to be perpetuated in the name of speech ‘correctness’ and clear communication. Oftentimes, these behaviors are actually perpetuating dangerous race relations. Take for example AAVE (African American Vernacular English) and how it has historically been degraded and rejected by speakers of SAE (Standard American English). Not only does this rejection deem a specific dialect as inferior, but it necessarily demeans the speakers of the dialect, as well. A similar practice can be observed in the colonization of the Hawaiian islands, during which the Native Hawaiian language was outlawed and prohibited from being taught in schools (Nordstrom 2015). This practice reflects the colonization and oppression of Native Hawaiian peoples, and though it happened in the past, the modern dialect of Hawaiian Pidgin English is often treated in a manner similar to that of AAVE and Native Hawaiian: it is perceived as inferior in intelligence and in clarity to SAE (Reinecke). Furthermore, similar to the historical discussion of whether to integrate or to ban Ebonics in the American education system, there is a current debate about the place of Hawaiian Pidgin English in the classroom and in the workplace (Young 2002). Therefore, I want to examine attitudes in the continental U.S. and throughout the Hawaiian islands surrounding the presumed intelligence and work ethic–among myriad other qualities– of a speaker of the Hawaiian Pidgin dialect.

In my own study, I am aiming to reveal general social attitudes towards speakers of this particular dialect so as to observe and exhibit the various ideas that folks hold about speakers of this language, thereby potentially exposing a perpetuation of historical colonialism. I want to study the attitudes among younger people, specifically ages 11-13, evaluating their stigmas surrounding Hawaiian Pidgin English-speakers. For many people in the continental U.S., exposure to this dialect is available primarily in movie-watching–and usually in the form of a character who isn’t the smartest or most motivated (ie, “50 First Dates”). Therefore, I am going to conduct a study that evaluates attitudes of kids who were born and raised in the continental U.S.  (likely midwest states) and compare these attitudes to those of kids who were born and raised in Hawai’i. The latter group is more likely to know or associate with real-life speakers of the language, which means they’re likely to judge speakers off of more than what they’ve seen in movies or media. These different levels of exposure inevitably contribute to the ideas that kids form surrounding the language and its speakers.

The superiority complex of the speaker of a widely-accepted dialect such as SAE upholds a dangerous dynamic of belonging versus foreign, intelligent versus uneducated, normal versus stigmatized, and other such ostracizing and demoralizing polarities. In 2015, Hawaiian Pidgin English was officially declared a language by the U.S. Census Bureau, which was a big step in paying back the culture a piece of its historically muddled identity. However, folks today are still refused jobs for speaking this language, and/or for having Hawaiian accents. There are still widely accepted ideals about such an accent or dialect as being inferior to SAE. In fact, in 1999, the then-Chairman of the Board of Education in Hawai’i blamed Hawaiian Creole for “poor scores on national standardized writing test scores among public school students” (Yokota 2008). This claim supports and perpetuates ideas that Hawaiian Pidgin English and its speakers are of inferior intelligence, and it ultimately rejects Hawaiian Pidgin/Creole as a legitimate language. I believe that it is important to survey modern attitudes towards this language so that we might call attention to the practice of linguistic discrimination, and hopefully influence and improve some social attitudes. While linguistic discrimination may seem based in comprehension or correctness, it is oftentimes (even if subconsciously) based in the discrimination of marginalized groups, which is why it is essential that we confront the issue.

 

Works cited:

Nordstrom, Georganne. “Pidgin as Rhetorical Sovereignty: Articulating Indigenous and Minority Rhetorical Practices with the Language Politics of Place.” Vol. 77, no. 4, 2015, pp. 317–337., www.jstor.org/stable/24240051. Accessed 11 May 2019.

Reinecke, John E. “Pidgin English in Hawaii: A Local Study in the Sociology of Language.” Vol. 43, no. 5, 1938, pp. 778-789., www.jstor.org/stable/2768923. Accessed 11 May 2019.

Roberts, Sarah Julianne. “The Role of Diffusion in the Genesis of Hawaiian Creole.” Vol. 74, no. 1, 1998, pp. 1–39. JSTOR, doi:10.2307/417563. Accessed 11 May 2019.

Young, Morris. “Standard English and Student Bodies: Institutionalizing Race and Literacy in Hawai’i.” Vol. 64, no. 4, 2002, pp. 405–431. JSTOR, doi:10.2307/3250745. Accessed 11 May 2019.

Yokota, Thomas. “The ‘Pidgin Problem’: Attitudes about Hawai’i Creole.” Vol. 40, no. 1-2, 2008, pp. 22-29. ERIC.ed.gov, EJ877774. Accessed 11 May 2019

Marelie Vorster

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For any person with an accent, the first question you tend to get when interacting with others is: “Where are you from?” Linguists note that accent is a highly salient or recognizable feature of an individual that allows listeners to identify a speaker as an out-group member or foreigner almost immediately based on their speech alone (Derwing & Munro 2009). They note that people are generally very good at picking up on different accents even with limited exposure, but that is not always a good thing. Adults tend to view familiar accents in one of two ways. Familiar, western accents like British-English and French-accented English are often given prestige in the US, while the accents spoken by marginalized or immigrant populations are often viewed pejoratively. Unfamiliar accents often face a similarly negative perception, with people rating individuals with unfamiliar accents as unpleasant sounding, unintelligent, and less competent than other speakers. Unfortunately this stigmatization and stereotyping of accents does not end in theory. It is often translated into the real world and leads to discrimination against people based on the way that they speak when they seek employment, housing, and even defense or protection from the legal system. Linguists refer to this concept as linguistic discrimination.

The interaction of accent, communication, and discrimination has been studied for several decades, with results showing that individuals with perceived foreign accents often face prejudice and damaging or incorrect stereotypes from native English speakers which leads to discrimination (Lippi-Green 1997; Gluszek & Dovidio 2010). This research is particularly alarming when one investigates trends in immigration and the international movement of people in an increasingly globalized economy. There are currently over 44 million foreign-born residents in the United States and only 50% of immigrants are considered proficient in English (Radford 2019). Immigration and globalization trends indicate that Americans will spend more time interacting with people who have foreign accents over the next few decades, rendering perceptions of those accents especially important for policymakers who hope to curb discrimination. Of particular concern in this context are the examples of linguistic discrimination that openly permeate institutions like universities. During that late 1980s and early 1990s, a sharp increase in the number of foreign accented professors and graduate educators (GEs) lead to complaints from students stating that they find it harder to learn new concepts or get high grades when the professor or GE of a course has a foreign accent. Studies show, however, that student outcomes are actually the same whether the class GE is foreign accented or not, and that many students complaints actually stem from bias and excuse making.

In order to deal with this issue, I have proposed an intervention that seeks to curb linguistic discrimination on the University of Oregon campus by educating students about the importance of listening and being an active participant when communicating with others. Research shows that it is much more difficult for a non-native speakers of English to try and change their speaking habits than it is for a listener to improve their ability to understand an accent (Xie et al. 2018; Bradlow & Bent 2008). For the intervention I recommend delivering a linguistics-based lecture and providing an accent training strategy to undergraduate students that enhances their confidence with understanding accents while also informing them about their power as listeners during the UO’s Week of Welcome student orientation. A well timed, science-based intervention, like the one have proposed, has the capacity to improve the inclusivity of the UO campus by creating a more positive environment for educators and students alike.

Kayla Walker

Posted on by cvaughn

When hearing someone speak, listeners do not simply receive the sound. Studies on monolingual English-speaking college students show variety of factors influence the way people perceive speech including expectation, experience with the speaker, and language background. Every time two people speak to each other, they make a constant stream of judgments, which influences communication for better or for worse. For example, brain scans indicate that speech from someone who speaks English as a first language will be processed differently than speech from someone who speaks English as a second language with a “foreign,” or non-native accent (Yi, Smiljanic, & Chandrasekaran, 2014). Other research indicates that a visual assessment of a talker’s race will impact the way speech is perceived. When a listener sees a face of an East Asian person, the listener will engage the processing system that they use for non-native speech before they even hear the speaker’s voice (Yi et al., 2014). Additionally, a photograph of an East Asian person or a photograph of a White person is paired with the same voice recording, listeners are worse at understanding the speech when it is paired with the photograph of the East Asian person (Rubin, 1992). This indicates that by the time a monolingual English speaker is around 18 years old, they are using visual racial perceptions to shift the way they listen.

For this processing phenomenon to occur, several things must be true in the minds of the listeners. First, they are able to visually identify racial categories. Second, they are able to identify linguistic differences between native and non-native speakers of a language. Furthermore, there is a connection made between the visual racial category and the linguistic cues. Listeners then use the racial category to form a linguistic expectation that impacts the way they process speech. Children are surely not born with these biases and expectations, so how do they develop?

According to Whitley and Kite (2010), visual development of racial categories happens gradually. They referenced studies that show infants do not use race to categorize, but that by 6 months, babies show implicit awareness of race and show familiarity biases. They also posited that explicit ability to categorize people visually by race does not fully manifest until somewhere between 5 and 9 years.

Similarly, Creel (2016) studied children’s ability to detect accents in. Using a Dutch accented speaker and a native accented speaker, she found that children from 3-5 years do not reliably use accents to differentiate speakers, and listeners from ages 5-7 only identified a Dutch speaker as non-native a little over half the time. However, there was a strong correlation between age and preference for the native speaker. The results all indicated that accent sensitivity increases with time.

I am interested in the way these two trends of development, visual categorization of race and perceptual categorization of non-native speech, interact from early childhood into adulthood. Some studies have already investigated the interaction of visual and linguistic racial perceptions in undergraduates. Campbell-Kiebler and McCollough (2012) used college students to test how students matched voices and faces according to perceived accentedness. They found that in this age group, there are well-defined perceptions of how well a voice fits a face according to the type of accent and how strong the listener thought the speaker’s accent was. When and how do children acquire this social knowledge? Do these perceptions change throughout adulthood? There is a gap in the literature and a need for more research in this area.

 

Works cited:
Creel, S. C. (2018). Accent detection and social cognition: evidence of protracted learning. Developmental Science, 21(2), e12524. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.12524 (Links to an external site.)

McCullough, E. A., Clopper, C. G., & Wagner, L. (2017). The Development of Regional Dialect Locality Judgments and Language Attitudes Across the Life Span. Child Development. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12984 (Links to an external site.)

Rubin, D. L. (1992). Nonlanguage factors affecting undergraduates’ judgments of nonnative English-speaking teaching assistants. Research in Higher Education, 33(4), 511–531. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00973770 (Links to an external site.)

Yi, H.-G., Smiljanic, R., & Chandrasekaran, B. (2014). The neural processing of foreign-accented speech and its relationship to listener bias. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 8, 768. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00768 (Links to an external site.)

Whitley, B. E., & Kite, M. E. (2010). Psychology of prejudice and discrimination. Routledge.

Anonymous

Posted on by cvaughn

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a pensioner in possession of a good amount of free time must be in want of something to complain about. Last week it was how Silicon Valley is “full” and traffic is “already so bad”, so housing developments must be stopped. The week before, it was the creeping communism implicit in Starbucks red cup Christmas promotion. Today we’ll be chatting about the nefarious elderly’s newest target:  young people’s voices sound funny, and this is cause for “serious concern™” .

But what in particular about young folx’s voices are sparking ire this time? It’s the phenomenon of “vocal fry”. Vocal fry is when someone’s vowel sounds have a pronounced creak to them. Linguists define it as “a subclass of creaky voice phonation that has recently been differentiated from other forms of creaky voice; vocal fry being described as a constricted glottis, low fundamental frequency, and more often periodic with a high damping of pulses” which is a highly precise and perfectly useless definition. Imagine the tasteful sound of opening the front door door to a house long abandoned, quiet that sound by about half, and superimpose it onto someone saying “aaaah” at the doctor’s office.  That’s vocal fry! Primarily critical of women’s voices, complaints about vocal fry burgeoned after a highly popular article on the prevalence of vocal fry in young people’s voices in the illustrious magazine, Science. For example (cw violence), an anonymous youtube user  commented on 5/12/2019 on a video of the glottal source of vocal fry that vocal fry is unhealthy because “It makes the listener want to stab you in the throat.” Yikes! 

College professor Penny Eckert conducted an informal study that suggests that older people find vocal fry more aggravating than younger people. And especially more aggravating in young women. This prompts the question: are old folks so cruel to innocent young speakers because they are old, or because the group of people who happen to be old right now are especially cruel? Over the next few weeks we at Radio Free Glottis will construct an experiment to attempt to systematically distinguish these two  explanations.  But first we owe it to you, dear listeners to provide a brief overview on what is known about vocal fry.

First comes prevalence. The hullabaloo is mostly around young women’s voices, but how prevalent is vocal fry in young American men? Researchers Abdelli-Beruh, Wolk, and Slavin find in a 2013 study that even though young American men certainly have detectable vocal fry, it is measurably less frequent than the rates supported for young American women, which is found habitually in around 2/3 of speakers. That 2/3 figure was obtained by the same three researchers in a 2011 study. There is also evidence that the frequency of vocal fry usage depends on who is being spoken to. Borrie and Delfino found in 2016 that young American women use vocal fry to match their conversational partner’s usage: more often when it’s used at them and less often when it isn’t. 

Usage also can be measurably mapped to opinions. Ligon, et. al find in 2018 that vocal fry usage in young American women is associated with adjectives like “vain, apathetic, disinterested, sleepy, chill, bored”. Not a good look apparently. However, the picture may be more complicated than it looks: Parker and Borrie find in 2017 that vocal fry in young American women is rated as favorable when the speaker speaks quickly with a high pitch and unfavorably when the speed is kept and the pitch is lowered. This suggests that many factors could possibly be at play.

For our methodology, we will use our unconscionably large budget to survey a wide range of people on their fry opinions from across the USA, aging from young to old. This ought to give us enough data to use more sophisticated statistical techniques to evaluate the difference between our age and cohort effects.

We hope that these findings will be helpful in Radio Free Glottis’s upcoming work trying to narrow down precisely who doesn’t like vocal fry, and why. Who knows, maybe being a grouch is a universal truth…

 

References:

http://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvoice.2011.04.007

http://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvoice.2013.08.011

http://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvoice.2016.02.005

http://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvoice.2016.12.005

http://doi.org/10.1016@j.jvoice.2017.08.002

http://doi.org/10.1016@j.jvoice.2018.03.010

Miko Suzuki

Posted on by cvaughn

Voice actors have shaped our childhood from Disney movies, cartoons, and anime. As they breathe life into our favorite characters, we become immersed in the realism of the story. However, one of these mediums is not like the others. One of them originates from purely Japanese dialogue. Many of our youths have centered around watching Saturday morning anime ranging from Yugioh to Sailor Moon in our comfy pajamas. It is in no doubt that cartoons and anime are seen from children across the U.S, later becoming a part of their childhood. Furthermore, (other than Japan of course) the U.S actually has the largest number of Japanese animation contracts in the world. Who else remembers watching Naruto Shippuden on Disney Channel XD?

However, unlike American cartoons, Anime are all works that have been translated and dubbed into English. Consequently, voice actors need to adapt from a translated script, in which we all know that translation and accuracy don’t have the greatest relationship. Although there are subtitled versions, anime that are aired on American T.V is always shown in dub. Interestingly enough, dubbed anime has been controversial from the start. Ranging from censorship, varying accents, or just not “sounding right”, dubbed anime just can’t seem to catch a break.

Through an online poll conducted by a website called MyAnimeList, a majority of the participants preferred subtitles. A total of 434 responses were recorded and around 50% preferred subtitles, 25% preferred dubbed, and the other 25% were fine with either one. Although it seems like the majority prefer subs, American T.V continues to only air dubbed versions. This is not only the case for children’s anime but for adult anime as well. Children’s shows being dubbed may not be unreasonable as multitasking could be hard for them. However for adult anime, such as on midnight channels through “Adult Swim”, it is still aired in dub despite the popular opinion of subs over dubs.

In regarding the preference for subs, perhaps this sentiment has something due to familiarity, as subbed anime is released before the dubbed version. Though I believe the perception that English dub alters the likeability of a character and their personality cannot all be cleanly summed up to the factor of familiarity. In fact, the issue may not be the language, but the entirety of dubbing foreign works itself.

According to a study by Pettorino and Vitagliano (2003), they found that English dubbed works had a tendency to sound inauthentic with artificial prosodic rhythmic features. They even claimed that English dub is different from regular English as it contains unique elements of rhythm and articulation rate. Furthermore, the target language tends to conform to the speech tempo found in the source language. Altering English’s own natural tempo in the process. Although the study focuses on Italian rather than Japanese, the sentiment that English dubbed is different from the English language is important to consider. Next, in a study by Caruana and Abdilla (2005), they interestingly found that dubbing a foreign language commercial to the consumer’s native language (Maltese in this case) is not any more effective. Their results provide insight that dubbing may not be as beneficial to consumers.

The general consensus is that people prefer the subtitled version over English dubbed. This sentiment is further backed by Pettorino and Vitagliano (2003) and their findings of the inauthentic qualities of English dub. Next time you watch an anime try something different and watch it in subs or dubs, whichever your not used to.  To get you started, here are two animated trailers with Japanese voice actors and English voice actors. Take a look and see if you prefer subs or dubs!

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZEOpfelkxQ (Links to an external site.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFVKmVTAHpk (Links to an external site.)

 

Works Cited:

Caruana, A., & Abdilla, M. (2005). To dub or not to dub: Language adaptation of global

television advertisements for a bilingual community. Journal of Brand Management,

12(4), 236-249. doi:10.1057/palgrave.bm.2540220

 

Pettorino, Massimo., & Vitagliano, Ilario. (2003) Prosodic Characteristics of Dubbed Speech.

Barcelona, Spain: ICPhS-15.

https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/icphs-proceedings/ICPhS2003/papers/ (Links to an external site.)

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