william labov's martha's vineyard study Flashcards
(1963)
What did Labov conduct of a study of?
- he conducted research into phonological change, carried out at a place called Martha’s Vineyard (a small island off the North east coast of America.)
What is a dipthong?
two vowel sounds occurring in the same syllable (e.g cow,eye)
What are demand characteristics?
a subtle cue that makes participants aware of what the experimenter expects to find how the participants are expected to behave.
What is phonological change?
any sound change which alters the number or distribution of phonemes in a language over time.
Examples of dipthongs that Labov focused his research on:
mouse and mice (specifically the /au/ and /ai/ vowel sounds.
How did Labov do his research?
- interviwed 69 people, ranged from different age, ethnic, social groups - to get a representative sample.
What technique did he use?
- interview technique
- this subtly encouraged the participants to say the words containing the vowels he wished to study.
What did he try to avoid to make the conversation as natural as possible?
- demand characteristics, this was so that the participants didn’t necessarily know what he was looking for…
What did his questions subconsciously urge the participants to use?
- words which contained desired vowels, e.g. life, might, right, which contain the diphthongs which he was interested in.
As a result, what did Labov find?
- pronounciation of certain vowel sounds were subtly differentiating from the standard American pronunciations.
- the locals tended to pronounce these dipthongs with a more central point, more like (ǝu, ǝi).
what did fisherman centralize more than any other occupational group?
/au/ and /ai/
which age group centralizes dipthongs more?
people of the age group 30-60, more than younger/older people.
