The retraction of /s/, particularly in /str/ clusters, toward [ʃ]
has been investigated in British, Australian, and American English
and shown to be conditioned phonetically and sociolinguistically. To
date, however, no research exists on the retraction of /s/ in New Englishes,
the nativized Englishes spoken in postcolonial territories like the
Caribbean. We take up this research gap and present the results of
a large-scale comparative acoustic analysis of /s/-retraction in Trinidadian
English (TrinE) and American English (AmE), using Center of Gravity
measurements of more than 23,500 sibilants produced by 181 speakers
from two speech corpora.
The results show that, in
TrinE, /str/ is considerably retracted toward [ʃtɹ], while
all other /sC(r)/ clusters are non-retracted and acoustically close
to singleton /s/; less retracted realizations of /str/ occur across
word boundaries. Although a statistically significant contrast is overall
maintained between /ʃ/ and the sibilant in /str/, there is considerable
overlap across many speakers. The comparison between TrinE and AmE
indicates that, while sibilants in TrinE overall show acoustically
lower values, both varieties have in common that retraction is limited
to /str/ contexts and significantly larger in younger speakers. The
degree of /str/-retraction, however, is overall larger in TrinE than
AmE.
Cite as: Ahlers, W., Meer, P. (2019) Sibilant Variation in New Englishes: A Comparative Sociophonetic Study of Trinidadian and American English /s(tr)/-Retraction. Proc. Interspeech 2019, 291-295, doi: 10.21437/Interspeech.2019-1821
@inproceedings{ahlers19_interspeech,
author={Wiebke Ahlers and Philipp Meer},
title={{Sibilant Variation in New Englishes: A Comparative Sociophonetic Study of Trinidadian and American English /s(tr)/-Retraction}},
year=2019,
booktitle={Proc. Interspeech 2019},
pages={291--295},
doi={10.21437/Interspeech.2019-1821}
}