Regional variation in high vowel deletion in New Brunswick French: Preliminary observations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper presents findings of a descriptive study that suggest that the deletion of high vowels, a process that is generally associated with Laurentian French, may have begun to spread across francophone regions of New Brunswick. The study examines the pronunciation of /t, d/ + /i, y/ sequences in a small number of lexical items, with a focus on vowel deletion. Based on acoustic phonetic analyses of sentences read by 136 speakers from the five main French-speaking regions in New Brunswick, results indicate that /i, y/ deletion rates are relatively high in the NorthWest, a region that is located adjacent to Quebec, but lower in other regions, with the lowest rates occurring in the SouthEast. Deletion rates are significantly higher among younger speakers than older speakers, indicating that this may be a sound change in progress. The results highlight an interaction between high vowel deletion and /t, d/ affrication. These preliminary observations provide guidelines for future dialectological and phonetic research on this process.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 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".