In sociophonetic research, ongoing advances in technology and software have facilitated the collection and analysis of ever-increasing amounts of data and ever-faster methods of instrumental measurement and analysis. As a consequence of this rapid growth, methods of assessing and characterizing sound change vary widely, making direct comparison between studies difficult if not impossible. Drawing on the analysis of 9082 tokens from the word list data of 114 speakers in the Synchronic Corpus of Victoria English (SCVE) (D'Arcy 2017), evenly distributed by age and sex, we examine the strengths and limitations of the University of Pennsylvania's Forced Alignment & Vowel Extraction (FAVE) automated software program (Evanini 2009, Rosenfelder et al 2011) as used to assess the following two vocalic processes: lexical variation in realizations of a diphthong (i.e., historical yod in the words do, new, student, tube) and systemic apparent time change (i.e., the Canadian Shift and back vowel fronting). We include discussion of variation in normalization techniques, recording equipment, measurement point, and controls on bandwidth in the data. We propose a method of using FAVE for the analysis of yod, defined as the presence of an onglide in the realization of /u/ in post-coronal obstruents. We also suggest strategies for facilitating the direct comparison of measurements on systemic vowel change across studies, comparing data from the SCVE and the Phonetics of Canadian English corpus (Boberg 2008, 2010) to illustrate. Our results highlight the need for the adoption of uniform best practices in sociophonetic research and are generalizable to analyses of both cross-generational change and stable variation.
Boberg, Charles. 2008. Regional phonetic differentiation in Standard Canadian English. Journal of English Linguistics 36(2). 129–154.
Boberg, Charles. 2010. The English language in Canada: status, history and comparative analysis. New York: Cambridge University Press.
D’Arcy, Alexandra. 2017. Discourse-pragmatic variation in context: Eight hundred years of ‘like’. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Evanini, Keelan. 2009. The permeability of dialect boundaries: A case study of the region surrounding Erie, Pennsylvania. Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 86. http://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/86
Rosenfelder, Ingrid; Fruehwald, Joe; Evanini, Keelan and Jiahong Yuan. 2011. FAVE (Forced Alignment and Vowel Extraction) Program Suite. http://fave.ling.upenn.edu.
