39th Annual Student Research Conference
Obstruent Deletion Patterns in Atlanta African American English
Nolan A. Regalo
Dr. Darrin Hetrick, Faculty Mentor
Deletion of word-final consonants is one of the most commonly described features of African American English (AAE). It has been claimed that alveolars are deleted more frequently than labials or velars in this position. This has been found to be true of nasals (Wolfram, 1989) and of voiceless stops (Stockman, 2006). This study investigates whether this ‘alveolar bias’ also holds true for fricatives by analyzing the speech of young adult male rappers from Atlanta in casual interviews. To account for possibly confounding variables, other factors are taken note of: phonetic environment, sentence-level stress, and part of speech (content vs. function words). Preliminary findings suggest that consonant deletion rates may be less affected by phonetic environment in Atlanta AAE than was previously found for other regional varieties of AAE, further describing regional variation in AAE, as has been a task of 21st century sociolinguistic research.
Keywords: Consonant Deletion, African American English, Phonetics, Phonology, Sociolinguistics
Topic(s):Linguistics
Presentation Type: Oral Presentation
Session: -5
Location: SUB Georgian C
Time: 2:00