This is an award for the purchase of a MacSpeech Lab I to supplement the capacity of a Macintosh SE to do acoustic analysis. It consists of a 12-bit MacAdios digitizer, a TTE anti-aliasing filter, a microphone and a speaker. With this equipment acoustic analysis will be carried out on the recorded speech forms of the last speaker (now deceased) of the creole language Negerhollands. There has been scholarly interest in the language (spoken in what are now the U.S. Virgin Islands) since the late 18th century, yet there is no satisfactory phonological description of the extensive variation reported for the language. Preliminary investigations suggest that the free alternation of forms in Negerhollands is comprehensible when analyzed within a quantitative paradigm. Acoustic measurement with the new equipment will yield a precise description of the phonetic characteristics of these variable patterns.
