My research utilizes quantitative methods to probe whether and how phonologial representations vary and change. To date my methods include acoustic analyses, and psycholinguistic paradigms, including priming, categorical perception, phonological judgment, and implicit attitudes tasks. A brief description of my recent projects is below. Here is my CV.
We have built a corpus of sociolinguistic interviews conducted with Black folks living in the Boston, MA area. Our analyses explore local sound changes as well as traditional AAL sound patterns with a focus on social class, ethnicity, and place variation. Our project website showcases the cultural life of Black Bostonians, and via interactive maps, explores geospatial variation in the language. Our data collection for this project occured during the pandemic. In Socially distanced but virtually connected: pandemic fieldwork with Black Bostonians (Nesbitt and Watts 2022) we describe explore the impact of virtual methodologies on sociolinguistic data collection.
For my dissertation, I investigated the effects of social change on phonological representations (how the sounds of a language are mentally represented). When a community undergoes a phonological change, individual speakers in the community are changing the mental representation of their language. It is currently unclear how phonological representations change. Some argue that phonological change is the result of phonetic variation while others argue that phonetic variation need not be a precursor to phonological change. I analyze acoustic and psycholinguistic data to investigate the diachronic and synchronic spread of two phonological changes occuring in Michigan. My findings suggest that phonological change is the result of phonetic variation compounded by social conditioning. This research adds to the growing field of sociophonology which finds that phonological representations can indeed act as sociolinguistic variables.
My work on Michigan and New England English probes the mechanisms by which entire communities switch from one vowel configuration to another. The results of this work emphasize the impact of sociohistorical circumstances and socio-symbolic meaning on structural change.
I am particularly interested in the social motivations for local dialect decline. My research in this regard has analyzed vowel production data from a corpus of Lansing, Michigan speech (see description below) to investigate the links between economic and dialect decline in the area. I conclude that the negative impact of shifting from manufacutring to service in the 1970s and 1980s had adverse affects on all things local to Lansing ... including the dialect. As such, a social class divide developed in Lansing, whereby working-class speakers continued the local accent and middle-class speakers began to reject it. I am currently investigating the links between these findings in Lansing and the similar economic and diaelct changes in other Rust Belt cities (e.g. Syracuse, NY and Detroit, MI). My work in Western Massachusettes (forthcoming) finds similar linguistic changes starting in the same time frame as that found in Lansing. Keep an eye on this space for more details!
In collaboraton with Dr. Suzanne Evans Wagner and my colleagues in the Michigan State Sociolinguistics Lab, I have compiled a corpus of speech from Lansing, Michgan natives born 1907-1997. Our analysis of these recordings shows that the local dialect spoken in Michigan and surrounding states, the Northern Cities Shift, is declining. This is an interesting finding in American dialectology because until now, the Northern Cities Shift had been sited as one of the only sound changes still progressing in the United States. Visit the lab's website to see all of the other amazing findings coming from this group!
Evidence for syllabic representations in North American English are illusive. This is especially true for so-called ambisyllabic consonants, e.g. the /m/ in lemon. Traditionally, there have been three major analyses for these consonants: they are onsets, codas, or linked to two syllables. Thus far, I have conducted a perception and production task to probe how American English ambisyllabic consonants are represented. Both suggest that ambisyllabic consonants are codas. The jury, of course, is still out.