Syllable Structure in Dialects of English

Linguistics

WHO: Samuel Almer, Ben Sommer, Rachel Walker.

WHAT: This scaffolded inquiry connects with an investigation that Professor Walker is leading on syllable structure in dialects of English, specifically US English and Australian English. The research focuses on words like ‘file’ and ‘hour’, which speakers tend to have difficulty classifying as one syllable in length or two. The undergraduate researchers have participated as part of an international research team to develop a research tool and protocol for annotating timepoints in speech recordings for these dialects to form a basis for data analysis and interpretation.

WHY: Probing the source of difficulties that words like ‘file’ and ‘hour’ pose for syllabification by native speakers will shed light on how consonants and vowels are organized into syllables in English and how this organization may vary within and across dialects.

WHAT'S NEXT: The research team is currently annotating speech recordings of US English using the MATLAB tool we developed. Once annotation is complete, the duration of components in a syllable can be computed and compared with syllable count judgments to gain insight on the nature of syllable structure as a prosodic unit in speech.

THE WOW: In winter quarter 2024, the research team developed and debugged a MATLAB tool for semi-automated annotation of audio speech recordings, which is designed to improve efficiency over standard manual annotation methods. After implementing an inter-rater reliability test, the team has begun annotating speech recordings using the MATLAB tool. This speech annotation tool can be adapted for use in other research projects on speech recordings, and it will be presented in a poster at the Linguistics Undergraduate Research Conference in June 202.