Keith Johnson (UC Berkeley) will give an in-person research talk on joint work with Alexandra Pfiffner.
Acoustic and visual properties of vowels in Oakland, CA
The ‘Voices of Oakland” project aims to produce a sociophonetic description of the English spoken in Oakland CA by life-long residents of the city. Our approach to this is to construct a phonetically tagged corpus of audiovisual recordings of sociolinguistic interviews, and then use that corpus to extract acoustic and visual measurements of accent features. This talk will discuss some preliminary data on vowel production highlighting two findings – one of interest to phoneticians and the other of interest to sociolinguists. The talk will discuss both these preliminary findings and some our strategies, experiences and methods in building this corpus.
