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Individual variation in the development of the Western Vowel System of Utah

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Published/Copyright: June 22, 2019
Linguistics Vanguard
From the journal Linguistics Vanguard Volume 5 Issue s2

Abstract

The BIT, BING, BET, BAT, BAN, BOOK, and BUT vowels of ten Utah English speakers (born 1883–1928) were analyzed over the course of several decades of their adult lives. Most speakers participated in the Western Vowel System by lowering BIT and BET, retracting BAT, and raising BAN, with some fronting BOOK and BUT. Speakers generally did not exhibit monotonic change across the years from expected positions for BET, BAT, and BAN, and for the most part for BOOK and BUT; however, most speakers showed change with regard to BIT, though speakers differed from each other on the direction of change. Even for those vowels with no consistent direction of intraindividual change, however, in many cases speakers were inconsistent in their production from year to year. Further, speakers’ envelopes of variation were different for various vowels, with the widest range of intraindividual variation in BET and BAT, less variation in BAN and BUT, and little in BIT and BOOK. It is suggested that the envelope of variation is at least as much as an important issue for studies of linguistic behavior across adulthood as any actual shift in linguistic behavior across real time.

Keywords: age; intraindividual variation; lifespan change; Utah English; Western Vowel System

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Supplementary Material

The online version of this article offers supplementary material (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2018-0020).

Received: 2018-05-16
Accepted: 2019-01-16
Published Online: 2019-06-22

©2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Research articles
  2. Language and aging research: new insights and perspectives
  3. Grammaticalization and the linguistic individual: new avenues in lifespan research
  4. Individual variation in the development of the Western Vowel System of Utah
  5. [In]stability in the use of a stable variable
  6. Implicit Causality in younger and older adults
  7. Processing gender stereotypes in dementia patients and older healthy adults: a self-paced reading study
  8. Perplexity – a new predictor of cognitive changes in spoken language? – results of the Interdisciplinary Longitudinal Study on Adult Development and Aging (ILSE)
  9. Repairs and old-age categorisations: interactional and categorisation analysis
  10. Ageism and interactional (mis)alignment: Using micro-discourse analysis in the interpretation of everyday talk in a hair-salon
  11. Taking the stance of quotidian in talking about pains: resilience and defiance
  12. No time to care? Interactional hurriedness in a Japanese nursing home
  13. Agency and epistemic authority in question-answer sequences between art museum guides and visitors diagnosed with dementia
  14. Accounting for forgetfulness in dementia interaction
  15. Embodied care: affective touch as a facilitating resource for interaction between caregivers and residents in a care home for older adults
https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2018-0020
Keywords for this article
age; intraindividual variation; lifespan change; Utah English; Western Vowel System

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Research articles
  2. Language and aging research: new insights and perspectives
  3. Grammaticalization and the linguistic individual: new avenues in lifespan research
  4. Individual variation in the development of the Western Vowel System of Utah
  5. [In]stability in the use of a stable variable
  6. Implicit Causality in younger and older adults
  7. Processing gender stereotypes in dementia patients and older healthy adults: a self-paced reading study
  8. Perplexity – a new predictor of cognitive changes in spoken language? – results of the Interdisciplinary Longitudinal Study on Adult Development and Aging (ILSE)
  9. Repairs and old-age categorisations: interactional and categorisation analysis
  10. Ageism and interactional (mis)alignment: Using micro-discourse analysis in the interpretation of everyday talk in a hair-salon
  11. Taking the stance of quotidian in talking about pains: resilience and defiance
  12. No time to care? Interactional hurriedness in a Japanese nursing home
  13. Agency and epistemic authority in question-answer sequences between art museum guides and visitors diagnosed with dementia
  14. Accounting for forgetfulness in dementia interaction
  15. Embodied care: affective touch as a facilitating resource for interaction between caregivers and residents in a care home for older adults
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