This Award for Beginning Academics grant will enable the Principal Investigator to begin to examine the evolution of the African American Vernacular English (AAVE) vowel system through an acoustic analysis of mechanical recordings of 90 African Americans with birth years ranging from 1844 to 1985, in comparison with white speakers from the same birth cohorts and the same or nearby communities. The first stage of the project, which the present grant covers, will be consultation with a recognized expert in laboratory phonetics, who will help the PI to address the following specific problems: How is the perception of variants in AAVE related to the acoustic data? What speech synthesis equipment, and what experimental design, should be employed to test the relative importance of different variations in speech in identifying the speaker as African American or as white? What state-of-the-art techniques in laboratory phonetics are most suitable for acoustic analysis of the type required for sociolinguistic research? Following the consultation period, the PI will begin the analysis of the recordings.
