A data-driven assessment of harmony in Quebec French [e] and [ε].

This study is concerned with the aperture of the mid vowel /E/ in nonfinal syllables in Quebec French. The hypothesis tested is that in underived disyllabic words, the aperture of /E/ would be determined via harmony with the following vowel. Based on predictions from a classifier trained on acoustic properties of word-final vowels, nonfinal vowels were labeled as mid-close or mid-open.

Vowels in urban and rural Albanian: the case of the Southern Gheg dialect.

Albanian comprises two main dialects, Gheg and Tosk, as well as a Tosk-based standard variety. The study was concerned with the extent to which the vocalic system of Southern Gheg, spoken in the capital city Tirana and surrounding rural area, has been shaped in urban versus rural contexts by extensive contact with Tosk and the standard. Through an apparent-time comparison across two groups of adults and first-grade children, one from Tirana and the other from the nearby village of Bërzhitë, we investigated three vocalic features of Southern Gheg: rounding of /a/, vowel lengthening and monophthongization, all of which were expected to be maintained more in the rural community than in the urban one, and also more by adults than by children.

Using Mahalanobis Distances to Investigate Second Dialect Acquisition: A Study on Quebec French.

Second dialect acquisition (SDA) can be defined as the process through which geographically mobile individuals adapt to new dialect features of their first language. Two common methodological approaches in SDA studies could lead to underestimating the phonetic changes that mobile speakers may experience: only large phonetic differences between dialects are considered, and external sources are used to infer what should have been the speakers' original dialect. By contrast, in this study, we carry out a longitudinal analysis to empirically assess the speakers' baseline and shift away from it with no priors as to which features should change or not.