Phonetic change over the career: a case study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This study is concerned with phonetic flexibility in adulthood. Through a longitudinal analysis of the speech of the public French speaker Michaëlle Jean, we explore the relationship between an individual’s phonetic characteristics and career path. We carried out an acoustic analysis of the contextual tense-lax split of the high vowels /i y u/, a phonetic feature of Quebec French that is not found in other French-speaking areas. Sixty-two recordings spanning three decades and divided into five different stages of the speaker’s career were considered. The results showed that Jean produced the tense-lax split as a journalist based in Quebec, but progressively suppressed it as her career became more international, after which a reversal of the trend was observed. Taken together, these results indicate that a certain phonetic flexibility is maintained over the lifespan, and that career is an influential external factor that could be more frequently considered in sociolinguistic studies. From a broader perspective, our study contributes to a better understanding of language use during social ageing, which has proven to be less linear than chronological ageing.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".