Foreign (a) in North American English: Variation and Change in Loan Phonology
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Previous research has shown that Canadian English displays a unique pattern of nativizing the stressed vowel of foreign words spelled with the letter <a>, like lava, pasta, and spa, known as foreign (a), with more use of /æ/ (the trap vowel) and less use of /ah/ (the palm vowel) than American English. This paper analyzes one hundred examples of foreign (a), produced by sixty-one Canadian and thirty-one American English-speakers, in order to shed more light on this pattern and its current development. Acoustic analysis is used to determine whether each participant assigns each vowel to English /æ/, /ah/, or an intermediate category between /æ/ and /ah/. It reports that the Canadian pattern, though still distinct, is converging with the American pattern, in that Canadians now use slightly more /ah/ than /æ/; that men appear to lead this change but this is because they participate less than women do in the Short Front (Canadian) Vowel Shift; that intermediate vowel assignments are comparatively rare, suggesting that a new low-central vowel phoneme is not emerging; that the Canadian tendency toward American pronunciation is not well aligned with overt attitudes toward the United States and American English; and that the national differences in foreign (a) assignment result not from structural, phonological differences between the dialects so much as from a complex set of sociocultural factors.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.156 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it