Jan 12 ====== Jannedy/Weirich:2014, Jannedy/etal:2015 --------------------------------------- [Jannedy et al.] În their introduction, the authors talk about priming based on known location/neighborhood. Could approaches similar to the ones in Van Berkum et al (2008), which will be presented later in this seminar, be used for such differences? (where participants of the study heard a voice and had either "Australian" or "New Zealander" written on top of the paper) When testing monoethnic monolingual German speakers, has there been an account for what dialect is spoken at home? I.e. not only if there is German spoken at home, but if the dialect spoken there is also hood-german or something else? [Jannedy and Weirich] It would be interesting to see results on different groups of people speaking Hood German, based on their second strong language. This should give a more clear overview on the influence of these languages (as was shortly mentioned towards the end of paragraph 3.1). Jannedy/Weirich:2014: "Speakers in the Hood German group ranged in age between 14 and 24 years. Berlin speakers were also all born and raised in Berlin (and had a larger age spread: there was one 14 year old, others ranged between 25 and 53)" (p.215) Isn't there a risk here that the age difference will affect the comparability, since differences in pronunciation could also be due to differences between age groups? Jannedy/etal:2015: "In both conditions, the word lists and the sentences, contrasting items followed each other." (p.2) It is not entirely clear to me why exactly the contrasting items were positioned together. Was attention intentionally placed on the contrast here to give more weight to a lack of distinction? "Figure 4 shows that the seven speakers identifying as Berliners (left boxes) have higher ED-values and thus produce more contrast between the fricative categories than the 11 speakers who identify specifically as Kreuzbergers (right boxes)." (p.4) I would be interested to know if there are differences depending on whether the speaker is in an environment with speakers who also identify as Berliners / Kreuzbergers, i.e., if the speaker is in some form adapting his pronunciation depending on the environment and other speakers. Jannedy et. al:2015 I wonder what the higher contrast for monolinguals (but also for those identifying as Kreuzberger) means with regards to why Hood German developed the way it does. Does or could this mean that Hood German developed independent from speaker background or that this was the first factor (e.g., the Arabic/Turkish influence) but then started developing independently from this? Jannedy/Weirich:2014 Why are the two groups (Berlin German & Hood German group) not of the same size and similar age range to make sure that this was actually "Hood" German and not "Youth" German? This way I would expect more variability in the Berlin German group than within the Hood German group. Could we observe a similar trend of merging /ç/ and /∫/ in multi-ethnic urban neighborhoods around here, e.g. Saarbrücken-Burbach? I also found it surprising that some speakers always use /∫/ even when asked to produce a contrast. While they apparently use it to perform their local identity, the phenomenon is known to me from the context of my family: My father as an Italian native speaker has never learned to pronounce [ç]. So my siblings and I use the merger in his presence as a form of code-switching. What kind of community was investigated in Hamburg? Also mostly adolescents with multi-ethinic backgrounds? The merging of /ç/ and /ʃ/ is something I observed also in Hannover when I went to school. Either young people with migration background or monolingual mono-ethnic Germans who hang out with them were characterized by merging of /ç/ and /ʃ/. Here, in Saarland not contrasting the /ç/ and /ʃ/ seems to be a part of the dialect. Could this be connected to the influence of another language speaker group (French) in the past? zu Jannedy et al. (2015): I wonder if there was an effect of the word pairs. At least one word of each pair seems quite infrequent, intuitively. Especially for 'mischt', I (native German speaker but primed by reading about the merger) didn't even understand the word until I looked at the English translation. (Also, did they really only use three minimal pairs?) Jannedy/Weirich:2014 It is mentioned that the age groups for Hood German and Berlin speakers were very different, with the age group for Hood German being 14-24, and the age group for Berlin German being generally 25-53 (with one single 14 year old). I'm wondering if this might have had an influence on the results, since speech production can also differ with age? Because of the larger age range, I'm also wondering if the age distribution between female & male speakers for the Berlin speakers was roughly equivalent, or if there was perhaps a difference there that could have had an influence on the results as well? Not a question and more of a comment, but I wanted to say that I found the topic of the differentiation between [ç] and [∫] very interesting. As far as I'm aware, a lot of variants of the Saarland dialects don't have a clear differentiation between these two sounds either. It's something that was pointed out to me in my own speech once, but only when I went to university and took courses in phonetics did I realise what was actually happening there. So it's very interesting to see this phenomenon in other variants of German as well. Jannedy/Weirich (2014): Would the result be same if the amount of the data tokens is equalized for both groups (Berlin/ Hood German)? Jannedy/etal (2015): Which acoustic features can be included for the further analysis? Jannedy/Weirich:2014 I don't really understand the normalisation of the duration of each diphthong to control sppech rate, i.e. by dividing its duration by the duration of the word. (3.1. Duration of diphthong) Jannedy/Weirich:2014 I figured, that the results from female participants differ from these of male's. My question would be, why is that? What does the gender have to to do with how the participants produce the stimuli/ diphtongs? Comment: When I was initially reading the introduction/abstract, my initial thought was that Arabic/Turkish played a role in the Hood German language variation, but my pre-conceived bias in the paper was the very first talking point they had which is refreshing from a reader’s point of view. Question: At the conclusion of Jannedy/Weirich, they discuss how Hood German probably originated from social group membership—or a dialect born from the in-crowd creating it over time—since it wasn't borne from Turkish/Arabic, what potential factors in this social group construction do you believe may have created these dipthong changes? In Jannedy et al, they mention that those who identified as one group had stronger/more pronounced Hood German, but is there any other criteria that you may have thought of when doing the project? Jannedy 2014: Was there a reason for the age difference in the subjects? it seems like it may have some effects? wouldn't it make more sense to measure speakers of the same age range? Maybe some further explanation of likelihood ratio tests would be useful?