Scott F. Kiesling - US grants

With National Science Foundation support, Professors Barbara Johnstone of Carnegie Mellon University and Scott F. Kiesling of the University of Pittsburgh will study the dialect of western Pennsylvania and the roles it plays in local life. The region is differentiated from some other dialect areas in its close association of regional identity with what is locally known as "Pittsburghese," features of which appear frequently in vernacular dictionaries and on postcards and t-shirts. The Pittsburgh Speech and Society Project (PSSP) seeks to understand the relationship between local identity and the path of change in the dialect by exploring the social conditions under which dialect awareness arises and spreads, and the linguistic consequences of that awareness. It is hypothesized that dialect features that Pittsburghers identify with being a "true" Pittsburgher will pattern differently from those that Pittsburghers do not use to symbolize local identity. NSF-funding will be used for the third in a series of sociolinguistic/ethnographic neighborhood studies documenting local speech, dialect awareness, and place identity in three contrasting Pittsburgh-area neighborhoods, and for a community-of-practice study involving intensive participant observation, recording, and playback and perception procedures.

As the first large-scale study of urban speech in the trans-Appalachian
northeast to focus on pronunciation as well as words and structures, this
project will make an important contribution to the study of regional and
social variation in American speech. The primary theoretical outcome of the
project will be a deeper understanding of the processes by which awareness
of regional and social dialects arises and spreads, and of the roles of such
awareness in language change. Because language is so important to
Pittsburgh's local identity, local archivists, scholars, designers, and
others have been recruited in the attempt to legitimize local speech as a
recognized aspect of local heritage and local cultural distinctiveness. This
work includes the archiving of interview data for historic preservation and
scholarship, workshops and lectures for community organizations, the design
and publication of a website for the general public, and consultation with
educators and media outlets.

When a child acquires a language, they must make sense of the language they hear around them. But this language is not always the same - it varies from speaker to speaker and situation to situation. Different people the child hears speak differently, and his/her mother will also use different kinds of language when playing or disciplining him/her. Professors Suzanne Curtin and Scott Kiesling of the University of Pittsburgh and Lori Holt of Carnegie Mellon University are linguists and psychologists who are exploring how children manage to organize speech sounds in their minds, and why they end up speaking the way they do. How much influence do caregivers have in this process? Researchers know from previous studies that children do not reproduce their parents' accent exactly, but that their parents' accent usually does make a difference in how they talk. It has also been observed that children of parents who have foreign accents are sometimes not aware that their parents speak differently from native speakers. What aspects of the child's accent are influenced by the caregiver, and what are determined by other forces (especially peers), and at what age? Understanding how individual children develop their own unique speech pattern will provide a greater understanding of the role of the language that children hear in shaping how they acquire language. Most research in this area has compared the speech produced by adults and children who have parents from different language backgrounds. This study explores how children perceive the language they hear around them, how they represent it in their minds, and how that knowledge changes as they mature.

Vowels are more likely to be pronounced differently in dialects than other speech sounds, even in the same speaker. For example, the way someone from Chicago says the vowel in "hat" is noticeable to someone from Tennessee, but there are no differences in the consonants between these two cities. Since vowels are more variable in pronunciation, and are also more easily measured with phonetic equipment, we focus on how children perceive vowel differences. First, children 6 to 24 months will be tested to see whether they can hear different ways of pronouncing the vowel in the word 'hay,' and in the word 'hoe.' In a second experiment, children are tested to see if they prefer one way of pronouncing the 'hoe' vowel over another instance. Methods to record children in naturalistic interaction with same-age children will be tested, as will methods to record interactions with a caregiver. These methods will help determine how children sort out all the variable information they receive in the speech around them and come up with their own way of speaking, and will be used in a future study that will follow children from infancy to school-age.

Under the direction of Dr. Scott F. Kiesling, Maeve Eberhardt will undertake an
acoustic analysis of the regional variety of African-American English (AAE) spoken in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Using the instrumental tools of sociophonetic research, this project will define the vowel space of Pittsburgh AAE and investigate the social patterning of vocalic variables within the community. A major goal of this project is to determine whether African-Americans use a selection of local dialect features, which contrast with one another both in terms of the type of linguistic change they represent, and in the level of social awareness associated with them. The use of sociolinguistic interviews, designed to elicit information about speakers' experiences in Pittsburgh, specifically their experiences as African-Americans in this city, will allow a holistic analysis of the connection between sociolinguistic variables, local orientation and racial identity.

This work adds to a burgeoning line of research in which scholars are turning their attention to regional varieties of AAE. It contributes to the body of work which explores African-American participation in or avoidance of sound changes occurring in local varieties, testing the claim that African-Americans do not participate in such changes. This research thus confronts assumptions about AAE which until recently have remained largely unquestioned, and challenges the field to depart from a purely racially-based definition of AAE and move towards one founded on regional linguistic characteristics, as done for other varieties of English. Finally, the results of this study will be relevant to early literacy and reading programs for African-American children around the country. The ever-widening achievement gap between White and African-American students demands attention from scholars of AAE, given that African-American children often experience substantial dialectal interference when learning to read. This research has the potential to directly impact tailored reading programs based on regional phonological characteristics, thereby building important links between sociolinguistic research and the education of children within the African-American community.

Despite the prevalence of social network platforms and apps in nowadays daily life, existing research on social media takes the terms "social" and "media" separately, and fails to address important needs for intelligently managing and utilizing social media, such as finding the information that users want, situating information in a social context that gives it meaning, and providing order and structure to an intricate and intertwined network of relationships. This interdisciplinary project will provide a holistic view of social media by combining socially intelligent language processing with linguistically motivated social network analysis. Specifically, the project will: (a) discover sociolinguistic communities and identify the demographic and sociological factors that underlie community membership; (b) discover cross-community linguistic variation at various levels and develop new computational tools for dialectometric and sociolinguistic analysis and for prediction of user interests and trends; and (c) recommend content and social connections across community boundaries, which will help people to broaden their perspectives with new information, opinions, and social relationships.

Intellectual merit: The project will lead to (a) new modeling formalisms that jointly incorporate linguistic information with social network metadata; (b) a new computational methodology for sociolinguistic investigation from raw text; and (c) flexible models of linguistic variation that model temporal dynamics and move beyond simplistic bag-of-words approaches to higher-order phenomena such as multi-word expressions, syntax, and joint orthographic variation.

Broader impacts: The project will lead to advancements in basic research in statistical machine learning, social sciences, and language technology. It will also bring innovations and practical applications in all these areas, such as software that reasons intelligently about community structures and linguistic patterns and conventions in social media. The findings will benefit a wide range of needs, such as personalized information service and intelligence and security operations, which require precise and timely understanding of social-cultural events and trends. The project will also provide undergraduate research opportunities and outreach to high school students through summer programs.

In 2005 the geographies of New Orleans -- linguistic, social, and physical -- were devastated by flooding following the failure of the levees after Hurricane Katrina. The disaster exacerbated what was already a dearth of research that has resulted in a lack of public knowledge of the speech of one of America's linguistically richest cities. New Orleans possesses numerous speech varieties, each linked historically to particular neighborhoods and sociocultural groups, but these varieties, along with the city's neighborhoods and population, have been profoundly disturbed post-Katrina. This dissertation focuses on two locally salient cultural categories, Creole and Yat, in order to explore the intersection of language, place, and identity, and also uses these speakers' experiences to consider how the flooding and population diaspora after Katrina continues to change local perception and construal of linguistic and other cultural affiliations. The historical processes that gave rise to Creole and Yat as cultural categories, current commercial and other discourses about them, and speaker and media use of local linguistic features are examined. Interviews, ethnography, discourse analysis, and participant observation are used to trace how self-identified members of these groups as well as public discourses use language to construct, reflect, and manipulate local cultural identities. The intellectual and academic merits of this study are twofold. First, it begins to redress the deficit of scholarly attention to New Orleans speech. Second, it furthers the study of the intersection of language, place and the performance of identity within the context of cultural appropriation endemic in global commerce generally, and post-disaster diasporic communities specifically. In contribution to the community of study, curriculum modules which link study of New Orleans English with critical language awareness skills will be created for use in middle and high schools, as well as a public, interactive, web-based archival resource for New Orleans speech and culture.