Revisiting raising: Examining multiple acoustic dimensions of diphthong-raising in South Louisiana
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The so-called “Canadian Raising” of /ai/ and /aʊ/’s nucleus has been increasingly documented in geographically disparate North American English varieties. We aim to determine the status of this raising in the southern state of Louisiana. While /aʊ/-raising appears to be a change in progress in New Orleans (Carmichael, 2020), little documentation of /ai/ exists. Via Qualtrics, 60 Louisianans were recorded reading 51 words with /aɪ/ and 37 words with /aʊ/ in various phonological and morphological environments. A preliminary analysis of 27 speakers’ data has shown that if raising is defined as at least 60 Hz difference in F1 of vowel nucleus in prevoiceless versus prevoiced environments (Labov et al., 2006), /aɪ/ raising could be observed in 74% of the speaker sample and /aʊ/ raising only in 7% of the sample. This suggests that while some phonetic / phonological conditioning for raising is evident in the data, the 60-Hz cut off may not capture a change in progress well. We will additionally analyze F2 in the vowel nucleus and diphthong duration in a larger, more demographically balanced corpus of 60 Louisianans. This study will add to modern descriptions of southern U.S. English and incipient vowel shifts.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".