The Low-Back-Merger Shift: Evidence from MENA Americans in the Upper Midwest and southern California
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Middle Eastern or North African (MENA) Americans are an understudied speech community in sociolinguistics. In terms of racial classification and identification, MENA Americans have been legally and historically classified as white but are not socially perceived as white (Beydoun, 2013, 2015). While early immigrants from MENA regions to the US were mostly Christians, ever since 1947, the majority of immigrants from MENA regions to the US have been from Muslim backgrounds (Orfalea, 2006); this demographic change can result in more ethnic visibility for MENA Americans in the US (cf., e.g., Shryock & Lin, 2009, for a discussion of ethnic visibility of MENA Americans in southeastern Michigan). Higher ethnic visibility can in turn lead to certain linguistic performances on the part of MENA Americans. Several studies have looked at the interaction of ethnic identity/visibility and local vowel patterns such as the merging of the low back vowels (the vowels in THOUGHT and LOT 1 ). For example, Hall–Lew (2009) showed that Asian Americans in San Francisco took part in the low back vowel merger and high back vowel fronting, which both index local meanings being part of the California Vowel Shift (Eckert, 2008). Going beyond one particular locality, Wong and Hall–Lew (2014) demonstrated clear influence of local dialect on the speech of Asian Americans in two different localities, with Asian Americans from NYC having distinct low back vowels and those from San Francisco merged low back vowels. Comparing the speech of three different ethnic groups in the multicultural context of Toronto, Hoffman and Walker (2010) explored two features of the Canadian Vowel Shift: the retraction of TRAP and the lowering and retraction of DRESS. Their findings showed that while Chinese Canadians disfavored these two patterns, British/Irish and Italian Canadians favored them. In another study in the context of California English, Cardoso et al. (2016) looked at subclasses of the TRAP vowel in the speech of Chinese Americans and white Americans of San Francisco. They found that the nasal split of TRAP (it being raised when followed by a nasal consonant, and being retracted and lowered when followed by an oral consonant) was more advanced for white speakers than the Chinese group. Cardoso et al. (2016) associated the observed difference to the social meaning of the TRAP nasal split in California indexing white or non-Chicanx social personae.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
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