“Dialect B” on the Mississippi: An acoustic study of /aw/ raising patterns in Greater New Orleans, Louisiana
Bibliographic record
Abstract
“Dialect B,” a diphthong raising pattern conditioned by a following obstruent’s surface voicing, was first observed by Joos (1942) among Canadian schoolchildren. It has rarely been documented for /ai/ (Berkson, Davis, & Strickler, 2017) and has never been documented for /aw/ in any North American English variety. Phonetic /aw/ raising, which has raised nuclei in words like “out” but not in words like “loud” or “outer,” contrasts with more widely documented phonological /aw/ raising, which has raised nuclei in words like “out” and “outer” but not in words like “loud.” In the current study, we examined /aw/ productions from 57 white suburban speakers of Greater New Orleans English, a variety where /aw/ raising before voiceless consonants is a change in progress (Carmichael, 2020b). We classified speakers into three raising patterns: none, phonetic, and phonological. All three raising patterns were present in our data set. This study thus constitutes the first acoustic documentation of a phonetic /aw/ raising pattern produced by a North American English speaker. Additionally, we probe the acoustic implementations of the patterns to analyze phonetic enhancement post-phonologization. These analyses add to descriptions of Greater New Orleans English patterns and build on recent work examining incipient vowel shifts.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".