Erik R Thomas

North Carolina State University, Linguistics Program, English, Faculty Member

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Papers by Erik R Thomas

Variable (ING)

Cambridge University Press eBooks, Feb 21, 2019

Sound Change

Sociophonetics, 2011

Sociophonetic trends in studies of Southern English

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2017

Studies of Southern English have largely kept pace with advancements in sociophonetics in other p... more Studies of Southern English have largely kept pace with advancements in sociophonetics in other parts of the world. They have expanded away from single-point studies of vowel nuclei to cover such topics as vowel-inherent spectral change, intonation, consonantal acoustics, and neurolinguistic coding of phones, especially with regard to ethnic identification. The ethnic diversity of the South, with African Americans, Latinos, enclaves of Asian Americans, and other groups such as Cajuns, facilitates growth in these new directions. Among the current linguistic trends of which sociophoneticians are staying abreast are the expansion of Latinos, social divergence within the African American population, and rapid dialect leveling among urban white Anglos. Integrating these developments with other advancements in sociolinguistics has proved more difficult. Empirical studies have incorporated various sociological methods with regard to social networks, but researchers are only now beginning t...

Vowels in North Town

Mexican American English

African American English speaking 2nd graders, verbal–s, and educational achievement: Event related potential and math study findings

PLOS ONE

A number of influential linguistic analyses hold that African American English (AAE) has no verba... more A number of influential linguistic analyses hold that African American English (AAE) has no verbal–s, the–s that, for example, turns drink into drinks in more mainstream English varieties.On such accounts, sentences like Mary drinks coffee are ungrammatical in AAE. Previous behavioral studies suggest that in addition to being ungrammatical, AAE speaking children find these sentences cognitively demanding, and that their presence in mathematical reasoning tests can depress scores. Until now, however, no online sentence processing study nor investigation of neurophysiological markers has been done to support these findings. Aimed at addressing this gap in the literature, the auditory ERP experiment described herein revealed two different processes associated with AAE speaking 2nd graders listening to this type of sentence: a morphosyntactic structure building problem, reflected in a bilateral early anterior-central negativity; and an increase in working memory load, indicated by a bil...

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Acoustic correlates of aspirated consonants in Maranao

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

Aspirated obstruents are rare in Austronesian languages, one exception being the southern Philipp... more Aspirated obstruents are rare in Austronesian languages, one exception being the southern Philippine language Maranao, as reported by Lobel and Riwarung [Oceanic Linguist. 48, 403–438 (2009)]. In Maranao, aspirated consonants occur as a reflex of a cluster of a former voiced stop and a homorganic obstruent (*bp > p’, *dt > t’, *ds > s’, *gk> k ’). The most obvious correlate to non-Maranao speakers is a dramatic raising of the following vowel, which also occurs after voiced obstruents, but not after historic single voiceless obstruents—e.g., /təkaw/ [təkaw] ‘startled’ (earlier *təkaw) vs. /tək’aw/ [təkʰɣw] ‘thief’ (earlier *təɡkaw) However, native Maranao speakers regard the raising as a property of the consonants, not the vowels. We examined the correlates of the apparent aspiration. The vowel raising is realized robustly and consistently, with some overlap in F1/F2 space among contrastive vowels. However, aspirated and unaspirated stops also show differences in VOT and ...

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A Phylogenetic analysis of the Southern Shift

Due to the character of the original source materials and the nature of batch digitization, quali... more

Some aspects of African-American vernacular English phonology

African-American English, 2021

Trends from Outside

Mexican American English

Prosody

Perception

Combinations of Different Types of Variables

Age vectors vs. axes of intraspeaker variation for vowel formants in North American and Scottish English

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Sociophonetics: An Introduction

Preface The Place of Sociophonetics Production Perception Consonants Vowels Prosody Voice Quality... more

Origins of Canadian Raising in voiceless-coda effects: a case study in phonologization

Papers in laboratory phonology, 2004

Canadian Raising is the best-known of a diverse family of allophonic height alternations in /ai/... more Canadian Raising is the best-known of a diverse family of
allophonic height alternations in /ai/, conditioned by coda voicing, which
have developed independently in widely separated English dialects.
Although the allophones vary considerably between dialects, the prevoiceless
allophone is always higher. We hypothesized that this typology is
due to systematic bias in the phonetic variation available for
phonologization; specifically, that diphthongs assimilate to their nuclei
before voiced codas and to their offglides before voiceless ones.
Predictions were tested in an instrumental study of the development
of a Canadian-Raising-like alternation in and around Cleveland, Ohio, in 28
speakers born between 1878 and 1977. Results supported the “Asymmetric-
Assimilation” hypothesis and contradicted two widespread views about
Canadian Raising, (1) that it arises out of the Great Vowel Shift and (2) that
the short pre-voiceless environment favors less-diphthongal vocoids. We
investigate the possibility of accounting for the typological facts in terms of
phonetically-motivated constraints in Universal Grammar, but reject it on
theoretical and empirical grounds.

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Age Vectors vs. Axes of Intraspeaker Variation in Vowel Formants Measured Automatically From Several English Speech Corpora

To test the hypothesis that intraspeaker variation in vowel formants is related to the direction ... more To test the hypothesis that intraspeaker variation in vowel formants is related to the direction of diachronic change, we compare the direction of change in apparent time with the axis of intraspeaker variation in F1 and F2 for vowel phonemes in several corpora of North American and Scottish English. These vowels were measured automatically with a scheme (tested on hand-measured vowels) that considers the frequency, bandwidth, and amplitude of the first three formants in reference to a prototype. In the corpus data, we find that the axis of intraspeaker variation is typically aligned vertically, presumably corresponding to the degree of jaw opening for individual tokens, but for the North American GOOSE vowel, the axis of intraspeaker variation is aligned with the (horizontal) axis of diachronic change for this vowel across North America. This may help to explain why fronting and unrounding of high back vowels are common shifts across languages.

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Vowels

Lateral Transfer

An Acoustic Analysis of Vowel Variation in New World English

An Acoustic Analysis of Vowel Variation in New World English examines acoustical variations in vo... more An Acoustic Analysis of Vowel Variation in New World English examines acoustical variations in vowel configurations in a wide variety of dialects of English found in the Western Hemisphere. While the work opens with an introduction on the methods and aims of the study, the following chapter immediately moves to a detailed discussion of distinctive vowel sounds called phonemes, characterizing each variant of sound listed within the cited reference literature. The remaining chapters provide explanatory descriptions of the variants of each dialect, reviewing past research specific to that dialect. While the United States English, Canadian English, and Caribbean varieties are featured in various chapters throughout the work, individual chapters are devoted to African-American, Mexican-American, and Native American English, emphasizing not only ethnic variation but delving into the historical development of each dialect. This monograph is an essential reference on vowel variation for all...

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Phonetic factors and perceptual reanalyses in sound change

Linguistic

Erik R Thomas

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