The emergence of gendered production between childhood and adolescence: a real time analysis of /s/ in Southern British English

Holmes-Elliott, Sophie and Turner, James (2019) The emergence of gendered production between childhood and adolescence: a real time analysis of /s/ in Southern British English. XVIIIth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, , Melbourne, Australia. 05 - 09 Aug 2019. 4 pp .

Record type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)

Abstract

This paper investigates gendered speech development between childhood and adolescence. A longitudinal sociophonetic analysis of /s/ was conducted across a panel of 13 speakers, first recorded aged 9-11 and again at 13-15. Acoustic measures of Centre of Gravity (CoG) revealed a significant interaction between Year of Interview and Gender. Male CoG significantly fell, while female CoG significantly rose. These data suggest that gendered speech styles emerge incrementally over time. Moreover, as CoG is inversely related to vocal tract length, typical physical development would predict a fall over time for both genders. As we only find this for the males, this indicates the emergence of gendered /s/ production is primarily driven by females. Inspection of style in the adolescent data supports this interpretation: only females show significant stylistic conditioning, while males are consistent across contexts. These findings are discussed in relation to the role of women in language variation and change.

Text

ACCEPTED gendered s in real time - Accepted Manuscript

Available under License University of Southampton Accepted Manuscript Licence.

Download (373kB)