Response to Class, October 13

I thought our discussions in class yesterday were really interesting.
I am still not sure I understand Praat as well as I could, but I'm sure if I play around with it more (and as we go further in the quarter with some of the more acoustic stuff) I will start to get it. It was really interesting to compare notes on how that last assignment turned out. I thought it funny that so many people had tried for a Southern accent (including me); I guess this was because the accent is so strongly "regionally marked" and that it's not as hard to imitate, even if ithe imitation is horrible. Also, I thought the cross-cultural stuff we discussed was fascinating: Nikolas' comment about the Brazilian equivalent of "like" that he puts into English conversation, Fatima's comment about the Arabic "you know," and then the discussion on the German "isn't it?" that's sort of added on to things, along with Meghan's husband's semantical switch. I recently watched a clip of Russell Peters, a Canadian comedian, on a similar topic with the Chinese equivalent of the word "like," which is something like "nega." I am also looking forward to hearing more about some of the projects which I think will come out really well; if anyone has any suggestions on mine, which is to see how well people can determine other people's accents, please let me know.

Speaking of accents, I got 8 out of the 10 different accent types correct in the quiz. The ones I missed were #5 and #8, which were a Hispanic and a black person, respectively. The last one was very obviously Indian, with very few aspirated consonants and really closed "o"s (like in most Indian languages), along with a difference in the structure when he said "fleece as white as the snow." The black Caribbean person also had a pretty distinct accent, with the "a" in Mary and the third "e" in everywhere pronounced similarly (almost as I'd say the "ai" in fairy), along with an "o" that sort of became a "u", as in "go'u" and "sno'u." Lastly, his "r" was a bit different: it was like the "r" in butter if you were enunciating it properly. I know that if I knew more Caribbeans (or, better yet, if I were Caribbean) I'd be able to tell where in the Caribbean he's from, as there are subtle distinctions between Jamaicans, Trinidadians, Barbadians, Belizeans, etc. The African American people were relatively easy to identify. There was something especially pertaining to the "a" sound, which the first woman moved to almost an "iaa" ("lyamb") and the second man stretched out too. The "o" had a clear diphthong as well, which the Hispanic people, for example, did not have as much of. In fact, I think I determined the Hispanic people in part based on the way they said their "o"s at the end of the phrases, which was an "o" sound without as much "u". The Arab man was also relatively easy for me to pick out, perhaps because I am slightly more familiar with the accent; again, the "a" in Mary and the third "e" in everywhere had a different intonation from other American English heard in the trial, though it was not the same as the Caribbean -- more of a straight "e" as in the IPA.

This was an interesting exercise because while I think they chose people with relatively strong accents from their respective groups, I didn't get all of them and I know that I do make judgments about someone's ethnicity from their accent. This, and it relates to the matched guise experiment we watched in the housing PSA, is important in realizing that we can't make those kinds of judgments accurately always, and that some people out there do take it to the next level where they discriminate based on the assumptions they make.