2021

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://digital.lib.washington.edu/handle/1773/48568

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    Collecting and using race and ethnicity information in linguistic studies
    (2021-10-28) Squizzero, Robert; Horst, Martin; Wassink, Alicia Beckford; Panicacci, Alex; Jensen, Monica; Moroz, Anna Kristina; Conrod, Kirby; Bender, Emily M.
    Despite being regarded by some as the most humanistic of the social sciences, linguistics has been criticized for its undertheorized application of the notions of race and ethnicity. This white paper is written for practicing linguists. We provide definitions of these terms and develop attendant issues that contribute to their complexity, such as the multiplicity and fluidity of racial identification. A survey of methods texts reveals that limited attention is given to race and ethnicity in training researchers. To address this need, the bulk of the paper uses a “challenges and recommendations” format to work through common design concerns and suggest better practices. We consider issues pertinent to collecting information about self-identification in a range of study types, from quantitative, experimental, computational or intuitional approaches to qualitative and mixed methods designs. We consider the advantages and disadvantages of eliciting demographic data using multiple-choice, free-response and interview formats, and offer recommendations drawing on best practices from within linguistics and its sister fields. Ethical concerns are raised, including using locally constructed labels, respecting communities, analyst positionality, recognizing the potential for harm. Throughout, brief examples are provided where possible to speak concretely to linguists’ concerns. The final section presents a detailed case study of the decision-making process for a multi-phase research project in which ethnic identification was explicitly investigated. Our goal is to provide researchers with tools to reflect on their own study design, reflect on their own responsibility to participants and communities, and design study prompts that allow more nuanced representation of race or ethnicity.
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    Characteristics of non-pre-vocalic ejectives in Northwest Sahaptin
    (2021-10-31) Hargus, Sharon; Beavert, Virginia
    Northwest Sahaptin, like many languages of the Pacific Northwest, has a contrast between ejective and non-ejective stops and affricates before voiceless consonants and word-finally. This article presents the results of an instrumental study of how the contrast is signaled in these contexts. Word-finally, ejectives are often realized as creaky voice on the vowel immediately before the ejective, which may in fact be realized as a fricative. Pre-consonantally, for ejective stops, the salient phonetic characteristic of the contrast is heightened burst amplitude. For ejective affricates, frication amplitude is not a reliable correlate of ejectivity. Instead, the only reliable phonetic correlate of ejectivity for ejective affricates is a silent period when the following segment is a fricative. The same characteristics hold for pre-vocalic ejectives. Neither pre-vocalic nor pre-consonantal ejectives are marked by preceding jitter, as in the word-final case.
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    Acoustic characteristics of Deg Xinag fricatives
    (2021-03-31) Hargus, Sharon; Levow, Gina-Anne; Wright, Richard
    This article presents an acoustic study of the contrast between seven fricatives in two positions (before [a], after [a]) using data from 8 speakers of Deg Xinag, an Athabaskan language of Alaska. An initial set of 52 measures of various properties of the fricative and adjacent [a] was narrowed to 13 non-correlated measures. Although no single measure distinguished all pairs of fricatives in either position, fricatives before [a] were generally differentiated by energy profile whereas differentiation of fricatives after [a] relied more heavily on formant transitions. In a subsequent experiment, statistical analyses were performed to help understand why *ɬ and *θ, which are distinct in Deg Xinag, have merged as /ɬ/ in the closely related language Koyukon. An additional experiment determined that one contentious Deg Xinag fricative, which has been variously transcribed as [χ] or [h], has more of the characteristics of /χ/ despite considerable inter-speaker variation.