URCAD Selfie Contest Winner: Adele Hare

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 14:26:40 -0400

What better way to celebrate your birthday than to wear a cone hat and leap for joy with your URCAD poster??!!

Adele wins a $100 gift card to the UMBC Bookstore!

Adele is a URA Scholar who presented their poster:

The Sociolinguistics Of Accents: A Philadelphia Case Study

Mentor: David Beard, MLLI

Abstract:

Two theoretical frameworks have been particularly influential in the study of phonological change in language: the Neogrammarian Hypothesis and lexical diffusion. The phonological development of the Philadelphia English dialect, particularly the unusual short-a split, serves as a compelling case study for examining these competing models. This quantitative study examines the phenomenon of “short-a tensing”. Analyzing the vowel formant frequencies in voice samples of older and younger Philadelphians can show variation within the speech community with respect to an ongoing phonological change. There are 20 participants in this study, in two different age groups: 18-40, and 41-62. All participants are native to the Philadelphia metropolitan area. Words with short-a were selected from Labov (1989) and Henderson (1996) as a sample of short-a words in specific phonetic environments. Recordings of participants’ voices are analyzed for the formant frequencies of the short-a vowel and compared between phonetic environments and age groups. Results demonstrate support for the lexical diffusion hypothesis, as the vowel varies consistently between different words, which is not expected if all sound change is regular, which the Neogrammarian hypothesis postulates. This research provides evidence for approaches to language that validate the natural variation that is observed between social groups.

Mark your calendar for URCAD 30: April 22, 2026!