Presenter: Jaidan McLean – Linguistics
Faculty Mentor(s): Tyler Kendall
Session: (In-Person) Oral Panel—Diversity and Analysis
Sibilant consonant variation is a well-studied topic in linguistics research to examine multiple social axes. Regarding gender, Zimman (2017) raised questions about the social patterning of sibilants in transgender speaker’s /s/ production since previous literature has only examined sibilant variation through a binarily cisgender lens. Focusing on transgender men and transmasculine people, Zimman found the social implications of gender identity and expression influence /s/ production in complex ways. As part of an undergraduate honors thesis, this study attempts to address the following two questions regarding /s/ production among a sample of transgender women and transfeminine people: How does speaker identity influence the patterns for /s/ variation found among the speakers? How do intraspeaker variations differ across speech, gender identities and expressions? Sociolinguistic interviews were used to elicit natural /s/ production, followed by a reading passage and word list task to elicit scripted speech. Focusing on center of gravity (COG) frequencies, this study finds its speaker productions to vary greatly with one’s expression and in certain linguistic conditions, both across the group’s and within individual speech. Such drastic variation complicates binarily established COG frequency ranges from previous literature and parallels Zimman’s (2017) findings. These data demonstrate the importance of considering all aspects of social identities as everyone is complex.