Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 1970, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects:

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 1968, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects:

Master of Science, The Ohio State University, 2007, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects:

Master of Science, The Ohio State University, 1966, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects:

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 1947, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects:

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 1919, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects:

Master of Science, The Ohio State University, 1970, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects:

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2008, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects:

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2023, Spanish and Portuguese

The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the perception of unstressed vowel reduction (UVR)—also known as vowel devoicing—in Central Mexican Spanish. UVR is a variable, gradient process in which vowels undergo a constellation of phonetic weakening processes including shortening, devoicing, and apparent deletion (Gordon 1998). While it is fairly common and has been well-studied in languages such as Japanese (Beckman and Shoji 1984) and Portuguese (Cunha 2015), its use is more limited in Spanish, and it is primarily associated with two regions: the highland plateau of Central Mexico and the Andean highlands. Although previous literature has examined the production of UVR in Spanish (Dabkowski 2018, Delforge 2008b) and the perception of UVR in other languages (Beckman and Shoji 1984, Meneses and Albano 2015), studies on the perception of UVR in Spanish are limited to Delforge's (2012) work on language attitudes in Cusco and a small-scale perception task in Perissinotto (1975). This leaves open multiple questions about how Spanish-speaking listeners perceive UVR, what factors influence their perception, and how UVR relates to issues of dialect perception and sociolinguistic awareness. This dissertation therefore seeks to provide an initial but wide-ranging view of the perception of UVR in Central Mexican Spanish by examining multiple aspects of listeners' perception. This was done by preparing a set of two perception experiments designed to test two overarching goals: first, how linguistic factors like phonetic variation, phonological context, and morphological context affect listeners' ability to perceive vowels; and second, what role UVR plays in listeners' dialect classification and language attitudes toward speakers. Additionally, questions of whether non-linguists notice UVR and whether listeners from different dialect areas differ in their perception were tested. The two perception experiments were administered online via Qualtrics, and a total of 84 part (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Rebeka Campos-Astorkiza (Advisor); Scott A. Schwenter (Committee Member); Fernando Martínez-Gil (Committee Member) Subjects: Linguistics

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2023, Speech and Hearing Science

This dissertation explores the relationship between quantitative phonetic measurements and listener identification of accents of English, focusing on phonetic distance and its perceptual correlates across various English accent varieties. The Levenshtein distance (LD) measure, which quantifies string similarity by calculating the minimum cost of transforming one string into another, is used to compare phonetic differences across accents. This study begins by investigating the diverse applications of LD across disciplines, emphasizing its significance in dialectology. Evaluation of different LD approaches and algorithms reveals that simpler methods often yield analogous or superior results compared to more complex ones. Insights from analyzing LD trends inform the selection of the algorithm chosen for the current experiment. Subsequently, carefully selected low- and high-pass filter cutoffs enable investigation of target phonetic features. Four English accent varieties are included in this research: Midland American (control), British/Australian, Hindi-influenced, and Mandarin-influenced. Hypotheses and predictions are formulated based on the documented correlations between LD and listeners' perception ratings of native-likeness and intelligibility. For monolingual American English-speaking listeners, frequent confusion is predicted between Midland American and British/Australian accents due to their similarly low LDs, amplified by filtering conditions altering vowel and consonant cues. Conversely, higher LDs are hypothesized for Hindi- and Mandarin-influenced English due to the influence of various first languages (L1s). It is expected that these two varieties will be more frequently confused with each other in unmodified identification tasks due to their relatively high LDs. The impact of filtering conditions on confusion is predicted to differ for each variety, with high-pass filtering affecting Hindi-influenced English due to consonant substitutions and low (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Ewa Jacewicz (Advisor) Subjects: Acoustics; Cognitive Psychology; Linguistics

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 1962, Communication Studies

Committee: George Herman (Advisor) Subjects: Communication

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2021, Spanish

Una de las caracteristicas mas notables del espanol puertorriqueno es la produccion de la consonante vibrante multiple /r/. Una de las producciones no estandares de esta consonante es la variante fricativa uvular sorda [χ], y esta es altamente estigmatizada en el habla puertorriquena, a pesar de ser considerada como uno de los sonidos mas puertorriquenos. Esta investigacion busco observar cuan posteriorizada se encuentra la vibrante multiple /r/, cuan frecuente son las producciones posteriores/uvulares en los municipios de Florida y Mayaguez, y si existe alguna relacion entre la produccion de las variantes posteriores/uvulares y el nivel de educacion de los participantes. Para esta investigacion se reclutaron participantes de los municipios de Florida y Mayaguez, Puerto Rico para observar el uso de la vibrante multiple y sus variantes posteriores/uvulares. Los participantes fueron entrevistados y se les presentaron actividades como una conversacion semidirigida, la identificacion de imagenes y la lectura de dos parrafos. Los resultados mostraron que la variante fricativa uvular sorda [χ] esta presente en el habla de participantes de ambos municipios, en diferentes grupos etarios, ambos sexos, y el nivel de educacion universitario. A traves de los resultados de esta investigacion se demuestra que no existe ninguna relacion entre las variantes posteriores/uvulares y el nivel de educacion universitario de los participantes del estudio. De esta manera, se puede comenzar a disminuir el estigma que se les otorga a las variantes posteriores/uvulares, al igual que al resto de las variantes no estandares en general en el espanol puertorriqueno.

Committee: Cynthia Ducar (Advisor); Lynn Pearson (Committee Member); Sheri Wells-Jensen (Committee Member) Subjects: Caribbean Studies; Linguistics

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2020, Spanish and Portuguese

Traditionally, Basque has three voiceless affricates that are different in their place of articulation. More precisely, affricates can have a lamino-alveolar, apico-alveolar, and prepalatal place of articulation and the graphemes used to represent them are respectively. Likewise, Basque has been described as having three fricatives with the same places of articulation as the affricates and they are represented by the graphemes (Hualde 2010; Ortiz de Urbina 2003, Gaminde et al. 2013, Iglesias et al. 2016). However, some speakers merge their Basque sibilants (Hualde 2010, Urrutia et al. 1988, Muxika-Loitzate 2017, Beristain 2018a). This dissertation analyzes the pronunciation of sibilants in a merging variety of Basque and it explores the effects of different factors on the merger, focusing on the effects of Basque-Spanish linguistic contact. In order to explore Basque sibilants, the data of 28 bilingual informants from an interview and a read-aloud task was analyzed acoustically. The role of linguistic contact was explored by measuring informants' degree of linguistic dominance through the Bilingual Language Profile Questionnaire (Birdsong et al. 2012) and by comparing their production of sibilants in Basque and Spanish. In order to explore informants' sibilants in Spanish, the production data of 24 bilingual informants from an interview and a read-aloud task was analyzed. The acoustic measurements used to explore Basque and Spanish sibilants were the Center of Gravity and duration. Separate statistical analyses were carried out to determine the most important factors influencing their production. The data of 14 informants who completed all tasks in Basque and Spanish was used to explore the effects of language contact in detail. The results showed that a higher degree of linguistic dominance in Spanish accelerated the merger of Basque sibilants. Moreover, informants pronounced their Basque sibilants in the front of their oral cavity, whi (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Rebeka Campos-Astorkiza Dr. (Advisor); Terrell A. Morgan Dr. (Committee Member); Fernando Martínez-Gil Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: Linguistics

Doctor of Musical Arts, The Ohio State University, 2020, Music

In North American colleges, universities, and conservatories it is not uncommon to find the main languages required of music students to be French, Italian, German, and English. Beyond the scope of these four most common languages, Russian, Spanish, and Czech are sung by more advanced or native singers of the languages; however, many other languages seem to be ignored in academia in both solo performance as well as in choral settings. It is a disservice to limit the scope of languages and repertoire when there exists a plethora of rarely performed compositions; moreover, it is not reasonable for these institutions to limit student's learning because of this “tradition.” Among the overlooked are the Scandinavian languages. This document will specifically address the repertoire of the most renowned Norwegian composer of the nineteenth century, Edvard Grieg (1843-1907). There exist but two published works that provide a singer with the resources to learn the pronunciation of curated Grieg selections. Neither of these resources was written by native Norwegian speakers; therefore, utilizing my linguistic skills as a native speaker and singer I intend this document to be a contribution toward the goal of providing near-native, accurate International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transliterations of three song cycles representing Grieg's early, middle, and late writing.

Committee: Scott McCoy (Advisor); Youkyung Bae (Committee Member); Edward Bak (Committee Member); Loretta Robinson (Committee Member) Subjects: Language; Music

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2018, Spanish and Portuguese

This dissertation focuses on variable vowel reduction in Mexico City Spanish, a salient feature of the pronunciation of this dialect in which a word like tomates “tomatoes” may be variably realized with a shortened, voiceless, or weakened final vowel. My research builds on studies of vowel reduction in other languages and varieties, and places Mexican Spanish within the typology of languages and varieties that variably reduce vowels in this way. My investigation of the phenomenon is the first to examine acoustic data to (i) understand the acoustic properties of these reduced vowels, (ii) describe and categorize them, and (iii) analyze their patterning with regard to linguistic and social factors. To investigate this issue, I conducted fieldwork onsite in Mexico City in 2015 and 2016, and recorded speech samples with 73 native speakers, women and men from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, between the ages of 21 and 81. The recordings include a sociolinguistic interview designed to elicit spontaneous informal conversational speech. Approximately 160 vowel tokens were acoustically analyzed for each of 40 of those participants using Praat (Boersma & Weenink 2016). For all vowels not adjacent to another vowel or glide, I measured the segment duration as well as the duration of full modal voicing within the segment, for a total of 6,504 tokens. Along with the results from the acoustic analysis, each token was coded for target vowel, surrounding segmental context, stress, position relative to lexical stress, syllable type, word position, speaker age, gender, and socioeconomic status, in order to execute statistical models that test the relationships between linguistic and social factors and vowel reduction. My findings from the acoustic analysis indicate that various types of reduction in the articulation of vowels occur, including a range of voice weakening, including devoicing, and weakened/breathy voicing, as well as extreme shortening. The findings from the i (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Rebeka Campos-Astorkiza (Advisor); Terrell Morgan (Committee Member); Fernando Martínez-Gil (Committee Member) Subjects: Linguistics

Master of Arts, University of Toledo, 2018, Spanish (Foreign Languages)

Este trabajo se centrara en el analisis linguistico de varios dialectos del espanol: el espanol de Colombia, el espanol de Cuba, y el espanol de Mexico. Con cada variedad de espanol, se analizara los rasgos fonetico-fonologicos, morfosintacticos y lexico-semanticos en una entrevista con un(a) hablante nativo(a) de cada pais. Para este estudio, se va a analizar una grabacion de una entrevista de un hablante de Pereira, Colombia y una hablante de La Habana, Cuba, disponibles en el corpus de PRESEEA (PRESEEA, 2014-). Para el analisis del espanol de Mexico, se analizara una grabacion de una entrevista realizada por el propio autor. Con cada analisis, se va a explicar y analizar los contextos historicos que han influido en cada dialecto y tambien los rasgos linguisticos generales de cada uno de estos dialectos. Estos rasgos dentro de un marco teorico que sigue los principios sociolinguisticos son tomados como el punto de partida en el analisis del habla de los tres hablantes estudiados. En este trabajo se observa la relevancia de las variables diatopicas, diastraticas y diafasicas en el habla de estos tres hablantes.

Committee: Juan. Martín Dr (Committee Chair); Kathleen Thompson-Casado Dr (Committee Member); An Chung Cheng Dr (Committee Member) Subjects: Language; Linguistics

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1986, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Education

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1977, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Language

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1977, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Language

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1977, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Language