Social variation of phonetic or phonological properties

Variability is one of the characteristics that distinguish human voice. There is no resemblance between the two tones because they cannot be alike. The variety of speech cannot be defined as disorderly or spontaneous. Instead, speech may be sourced from a variety of sources, resulting in trends that are law-managed or controlled (Foulkes & Docherty 2006). Phonology and phonetics research has been conducted in order to recognize these trends. There is also assistance in identifying the origins of complex trends. A description of the systemic difference in speech is used to assist or assist in differentiating phonological information from the phonetic process. There is also insight given in speech production operation. A thing to be noted is that phones are said to differ when it comes to their intrinsic properties.
Sociophonetic variation can be said to be the variation in a speech that in a way has a correlation with the social factors. Examples of social factors social class, gender or age. A notable thing is that rare to find phonological studies that have social dimensions included in their methodology.Sociophonetic factors have remained peripheral to phonology due to a couple of reasons. One of them can be said to be the existence of differences between speakers of a specific language. There is also the prominence in the generative tradition (Foulkes & Docherty 2006).
The main goal of this paper is to evaluate the phonological property of a language. Also the, in addition, assess the sociophonetic variation to provide theoretical modeling. This in consideration of the phonology and phonetics. In order to do this, there will be a look at what is sociophonetic variation and sociophonetics.An examination of the relationship existing between sociophonetics and speech linguistic properties will be done. A discussion of the importance of sociophonetic concerns when it comes to phonology will be done.
Literature review
A look at sociophonetics displays it as having a definition that is somewhat unclear. The first mention of the word sociophonetics was in an article done in 1974 by Deshaies-Lafontaine.The only first appearance observed in linguistics in phonetics dictionary is the fifth edition. The previous editions have no mention of the word sociophonetics or its description.Sociophonetics has been used by phonetics when describing or referring to speech production accounts that are found in various different tongues. There has been the usage of sociophonetics in sociolinguistics when it comes to work performed by variationist tradition. This type of work has a concentration on the various interrelationships existing between social factors and phonological appearance. The talked about socio factors includes the speaker’s background and their speaking style.
There is also the issue of phonetic variation. As mentioned earlier, the meaning of phonological variation is the variation in a speech that in a way has a correlation with the social factors. In the explanation of sociophonology, there is the division of it into two types or rather categories. For instance a consideration of the Latin American English, it can be divided into two groups (Lipski 2011). There is the regional variation and the geographical variation. Under the geographical variation, there can be the absence or either the presence of exact phonological oppositions. One can say that in this type of variation there is the consideration of the historical dialectologists and can be an outcome of constant language contact. Another contributing factor under this variation is the internal evolution of the language. The traditional dialect geography basis can be said to be the regional phonology variation. There is a linkage of self–identity under this type of variation (Lipski, 2011).
The phonetic attributes and phonological structure of an individual in a way affect his or her pronunciations when it comes to foreign language. This is keeping in mind that the individual has learned the foreign language in adulthood. A study has shown that there occurs interference of the cross-language in various organization levels. An example is a mispronunciation that occurs when a speaker first speaks a foreign language. This occurs due to the fact that the speaker has had no comparable sound existing in his/her native language’s phonemic inventory (Flege & Port, 1981).In the learning of a foreign language if there exist distinguishing attributes that are commutable then the language could be easy to learn for the speaker. Another determining factor is whether the distinguishing factors can be transferred from sound to sound. This is because of the consideration of the foreign language speech sound that stands for the native language phonemic inventory’s “hole in the pattern”. If the distinguishing factors can be transferred from sound to sound, then this means that the foreign language should be easy to learn and understand (Flege & Port 1981).
Another study to check whether two languages speakers utilize a different method when identifying sounds that are similar. In this study, there was the use of English and Spanish stops that have short-lag VOT (Bohn & Flege, 1993).The use of the stops was done after consideration of the fact that English voiced stops and Spanish voiceless stops. An assumption was made that Spanish and English speakers have distinguishing phonetic category representations when it comes to stops like English /d/ and the Spanish/t/ (Bohn & Flege, 1993).
There has been a look at the language set experiments in the earlier voice perception studies. In these studies, there was the induction of the listeners to look at the short tags as English do monolingual native speakers (Bohn & Flege, 1993). The outcome of these studies was conflicting. One of the studies showed that the English monolinguals heard the speaking of stops with short –lag VOT more in comparison to the Spanish monolinguals (Bohn & Flege, 1993). There was also a failure to show the language set effect in two of the five carried out studies. One of the reasons for this was due to the use of less elaborate procedures in the creation of the different language sets. The other problem could be the use of synthetic stimuli in the two failed studies (Bohn & Flege, 1993).
Rationale and research questions
The study will include the investigation of the effects of phonological or phonetic properties on children directive speech. This study will help come up with an overall conclusion of the phonetic property of a language. A thing to note is that the child directive speech has a social function which is to enable initiation and maintenance of communication. First of all, one need to become aware of the features or rather the attribute of child directive speech. They include the use of terminals that are high rising and pitch range that is wide. In short, the lesson that a child learns is that speech is a social activity. Since child directive speech serves to enable input of language into a child, the study of the phonological variation in child-directed speech helps show the phonological properties of language.
The question to be asked include what are the age or gender variation existence in child-directed speech. One needs to know that child-directed speech features differ as for the child’s age function. The child-directed speech goes away slowly from the repertoires of the parents as the child develops. Therefore, the parent’s speech features become different as time continues or rather are dependent on time. Gender factor comes in the case of interaction. An observable thing is that there is a difference when it comes how the fathers and mother interact with their children. An example is that the sons are less interrupted by the parents compared to the daughters. The issue of how the mothers use reported speech towards their children shows that gender is also a factor when it comes to child-directed speech.
Method
The following is the approach that will be taken towards the conduction the proposed study. The children to be used in this study will be thirty in number. Due to the fact that they are minor, they will be accompanied by caregivers. The following will be the used sample design.
2.0 2.5 3.0 3.5 4.0
Boys 3 3 3 3 3
Girls 3 3 3 3 3

The age of the children started at 2.0 due to the fact that this is the age during which phonological levels are well practical. Past the age of four years, the control of linguistic input is complicated. It will be good to pick the sample children from a community that the adults have already had a study done of them. If not available, the adults of that community have to undergo a speech related study. This is to ensure that there is a comparison between the speakers.
The method to be used in the selection of the sample children includes picking of the children whose parents are monolingual English speakers. The children have to be first born only to minimize the possibility of effects of sibling communication. Also, the other considered factor is they should have normal development. This includes ensuring they were born as result of a full term pregnancy.
In terms of data collection, there has to be a collection of as much information from the child and mother. The recordings or rather the collection the data has to take around thirty to thirty-five minutes. The use of the fathers in the study was avoided due to the various circumstances existing. First of all, in cases was the father is the main provider, the scheduling of the recordings would become stressful. Also, there has to be a consideration the fact that father in most families has less interaction with the child compared to the mother.
There will be the utilization of a combination of auditory and acoustic criteria in the analysis the data. IPA symbols will be used in unitary transcriptions when it comes to auditory analysis. The acoustic analysis will be utilized in the registration of key parameter measurements.
The use of control materials such as ESV will be implemented in the comparisons. One of the comparisons will be that between the phonetic and phonological performance of the children and that of their parents which in our case will be the mothers. There will a comparison of the phonological variants of the mothers and that of the adult speakers in the community. This will assist in identification of any evidence of segmental modification in the child-directed speech.
Prediction of the results
The outcome of this study should be the identification of the variable (t). This variable will show the phonetic and sociolinguistic variation pattern. The results will be achieved after the consideration the phonological circumstances. There will be consideration of the glottal who in this study are those compliant to the IPA definition of a glottal stop. Under the results, there will representation of the data quantification in a graph. Below is an example of the required graph.


In the graph, the first bar represents the information retrieved from the children during the study. The middle bar which is the women represents information recorded from the mothers of the children in the study. The last bar which is the men will represent the men that participated in the recordings if any although the advice would be not to involve the fathers.
There will be also a graph to show the distribution of [t] variants by age and gender. This can be represented in a scatter plot. The below diagram is an example of the scatter plot be used in the representation of the recorded information. The information on it will be able to show the gender differentiation and comparison of the variant utilization in both genders at childhood. The expected conclusion of the study will be that child-directed does not in a clear way contribute to the learning of the phonological variants by the child.









References
Lipski, J. (2011). Socio-phonological variation in Latin American Spanish. The handbook of Hispanic sociolinguistics, 72-97.

Foulkes, P., & Docherty, G. (2006). The social life of phonetics and phonology. Journal of phonetics, 34(4), 409-438.

Flege, J. E., & Port, R. (1981). Cross-language phonetic interference: Arabic to English. Language and speech, 24(2), 125-146.

Bohn, O. S., & Flege, J. E. (1993). Perceptual switching in Spanish/English bilinguals. Journal of Phonetics, 21(3), 267-290.

Foulkes, P., Docherty, G. J., & Watt, D. (2005). Phonological variation in child-directed speech. Language, 81(1), 177-206.

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