LVC lab news and recent publications (Fall 2020)!

The Since our last update in the Summer of 2018, the LVC lab has been quite productive. In February 2019, American Speech published “Exploring African American Language in the Nation’s Capital: Studies with the Corpus of Regional African American Language” (edited by Kendall and Farrington). This issue featured articles from members of the lab and colleagues who were given beta access to CORAAL:DC.

In May 2019, Charlie Farrington defended his dissertation, Language Variation and the Great Migration: Regionality and African American Language. In July 2019, Jason McLarty defended Prosodic Prominence Perception, Regional Background, Ethnicity and Experience: Naive Perception of African American English and European American English, just prior to starting his job at Emory University.

Charlotte Vaughn and Tyler Kendall published Stylistically coherent variants: Cognitive representation of social meaning in Revista de Estudos da Linguagem in 2019 and Exploring vowel formant estimation through simulation based techniques in Linguistics Vanguard in 2020.

In early 2020, Kaylynn Gunter published her first qualifying paper (co-authored with Charlotte Vaughn and Tyler Kendall), called Perceiving Southernness: Vowel Categories and Acoustic Cues in Southernness Ratings, in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

Two books are forthcoming from members of the lab. In November 2020, African American Language Language development from Infancy to Adulthood (Mary Kohn, Walt Wolfram, Charlie Farrington, Jennifer Renn and Janneke Van Hofwegen) will be published by Cambridge University Press. This project is the culmination of several decades of a pioneering linguistic survey.

In May 2021, Sociophonetics, by Tyler Kendall and Valerie Fridland, will be published as part of Cambridge’s Key Topics in Sociolinguistics Series.

For more information, see our publications page!

Recent LVC lab publications (Summer 2018)!

The first two issues of American Speech in 2018 feature several members of the LVC lab! The February 2018 issue includes Jason McLarty’s article “African American Language and European American English intonation variation over time in the American South“, which is work that comes out of his second qualifying paper at UO.

In the May 2018 issue, Charlie Farrington, Tyler Kendall and Valerie Fridland published “Vowel dynamics in the Southern Vowel Shift.” This work comes out of Tyler and Valerie’s production/perception study, and was Charlie’s second qualifying paper.

Appearing in the same issue, Charlotte Vaughn, Tyler Kendall and Kaylynn Gunter’s article, “Probing the social meaning of English adjective intensifiers as a Class Lab Project” was included as part of the annual Teaching American Speech section.

And lastly, Charlotte and Tyler’s paper, “Listener sensitivity to probabilistic conditioning of sociolinguistic variables: The case of (ING)” will be included in the December 2018 issue of the Journal of Memory and Language. It is available online now!

For more information, see our publications page!

UO LVC @ LSA/ADS

Last weekend, several members of the LVC lab presented papers at both the LSA and ADS annual meetings, which were held at the Grand American Hotel in Salt Lake City, Utah. More information available at the LSA Annual Meeting website.

Valerie Fridland (University of Nevada, Reno), Tyler Kendall (University of Oregon): What is the California Vowel Shift? And, how would we know?
Charlotte Vaughn (University of Oregon), Tyler Kendall (University of Oregon), Kaylynn Gunter (University of Oregon): Exploring the social meaning of adjective intensification
Misaki Kato (University of Oregon, SPPL Lab), Melissa Baese-Berk (University of Oregon, SPPL Lab), Charlotte Vaughn (University of Oregon), Tyler Kendall (University of Oregon): The effects of pause location and duration on perceived fluency of native and non-native speech

And on January 6th, at the New Data and New Research on African American Language symposium, the LVC Lab unveiled the Online Resources for African American Language (ORAAL) and officially released the first version of the Corpus of Regional African American Language (CORAAL). Several lab members presented papers at the symposium, including:

Tyler Kendall (University of Oregon): Introducing CORAAL: the design and implementation of the Corpus of Regional African American Language
Taylor Jones (University of Pennsylvania), Jason McLarty (University of Oregon), Chris Hall (CulturePoint, LLC): Corpus-based sociophonetic approaches to gradient post-vocalic r-lessness in African American Language
Charlie Farrington (University of Oregon), Shelby Arnson (University of Oregon), Tyler Kendall (University of Oregon): Back vowel changes in Washington DC African American Language over the twentieth century

Members of the LVC Lab in Salt Lake City

LVC lab has moved to 1600 Millrace Drive!

After more than six years, on Wednesday December 6th, 2017, the LVC lab bid our old home, at the Center for Medical Education and Research, adieu. Along with all the other labs in CMER, we moved to the third floor of 1600 Millrace Drive, part of Riverfront Research Park (directions).

Stop by the lab if you’re in the area.

Emma and Charlie in the new lab space

UO LVC @ NWAV 46

This past weekend, Jason McLarty, Tyler Kendall, Charlotte Vaughn, and Charlie Farrington presented papers at NWAV 46, which was held at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, WI.

Tyler Kendall and Valerie Fridland: (Part of the “Sociolinguistics of bad data” workshop)

Tyler Kendall: Using large corpora in sociolinguistics (part of the “Sociolinguistics and forensic speech science: knowledge- and data-sharing” workshop)

Jason McLarty, Charlotte Vaughn, and Tyler Kendall: Acoustic correlates of perceived prominence in African American English and European American English

Charlie Farrington: Incomplete neutralization in African American English: The role of vowel duration

Jason McLarty talking about some prosody

UO LVC @ Methods XVI in Tokyo!

This week, Tyler Kendall is representing the UO LVC lab at Sixteenth International Conference on Methods in Dialectology (Methods XVI), which is being held at NINJAL (National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics), in Tokyo, Japan.

Tyler Kendall & Charlotte Vaughn: Sociolinguistic variables and internal constraints from a listener perspective

Tyler Kendall, Charlie Farrington, & Jason McLarty: Public Corpora and Research on African American Language

Faculty Excellence Award for Tyler Kendall!

Congratulations to LVC Lab Director Tyler Kendall on winning a University of Oregon Fund for Faculty Excellence Award! To quote from the announcement, “This honor is granted in recognition of the significant impact of your scholarly work and your enduring commitment and contribution to our shared institutional spirit of learning, intellectual inquiry, and service.” Tyler’s work continues to be on the cutting edge of sociolinguistics and related work, and we are happy to see his work being recognized within the university.

For more information on Tyler and the other recipients of this year’s award, see this news brief from Around the O.

Digging into Data: SPADE!

April 2017

The LVC Lab is thrilled to be a part of the SPADE project (“SPeech Across Dialects Of English: Large-Scale Digital Analysis Of A Spoken Language Across Space And Time”), which has just been awarded a grant in the fourth Trans-Atlantic Partnership Digging into Data challenge. Our team from the University of Oregon is working with an international partnership, including North Carolina State University (US), Glasgow University (UK), and McGill (Canada), to develop new tools and resources for advancing large-scale analysis of speech data.

See more on the DiD website: https://diggingintodata.org/awards/2016/project/speech-across-dialects-english-spade-large-scale-digital-analysis-spoken

Lab Members Shelby Arnson and Charlie Farrington receive Best Student Paper Award at NWAV 45!

Shelby Arnson and Charlie Farrington received the Best Student Paper Award for their paper presentation at NWAV 45, held in Vancouver, British Columbia on November 3-6, 2016. The title of their paper was “Twentieth century sound change in Washington DC African American English”. This paper utilized data from the soon-to-be released public Corpus of Regional African American Language. Their abstract can be found at the NWAV 45 website. The conference was hosted jointly by the University of Victoria, Simon Fraser University and the University of British Columbia. Members of the Language Variation and Computation Lab at the University of Oregon are extremely proud of both Shelby and Charlie for this accomplishment.