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Record W4410215498 · doi:10.3390/languages10050105

Why Do Back Vowels Shift in Heritage Korean?

2025· article· en· W4410215498 on OpenAlexafffundabout
Laura Griffin, Naomi Nagy

Bibliographic record

VenueLanguages · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldPsychology
TopicPhonetics and Phonology Research
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Toronto
FundersSocial Sciences and Humanities Research Council of CanadaUniversity of Toronto
KeywordsLinguisticsPhilosophy

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

For heritage speakers (HSs), expectations of influence from the community’s dominant language are pervasive. An alternative account for heritage language variability is that HSs are demonstrating sociolinguistic competence: HSs may either initiate or carry forward a pattern of variation from the homeland variety. We illustrate the importance of this consideration, querying whether /u/-fronting in Heritage Korean is best interpreted as influence from Toronto English, where /u/-fronting also occurs, or a continuation of an ongoing vowel shift in Homeland (Seoul) Korean that also involves /ɨ/-fronting and /o/-fronting. How can patterns of social embedding untangle this question that is central to better understanding sociolinguistic competence in HSs? For Korean vowels produced in sociolinguistic interviews by Heritage (8 adult immigrants, 8 adult children of immigrants) and 10 Homeland adults, F1 and F2 were measured (13,232 tokens of /o/, 6810 tokens of /u/, and 20,637 tokens of /ɨ/), normalized and subjected to linear regression. Models predict effects of gender, age, orientation toward Korean language and culture, the speaker’s average F2 for the other shifting vowels, and duration. These models highlight HS’s sociolinguistic competence: Heritage speakers share linguistic and social patterns with Homeland Korean speakers that are absent in English. Additionally, heritage speakers lack the effects of factors attested in the English change.

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 machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.002
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.013
Threshold uncertainty score0.026

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.002
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.001
Scholarly communication0.0010.001
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0030.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.018
GPT teacher head0.362
Teacher spread0.345 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes3
Has abstractyes

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