Record Yourself at Home
How do Oklahomans sound? Record yourself reading short passages and lend your voice to our audio collection from around the state.
It takes about 15 minutes, and you'll receive a $5 Amazon gift card by email.
Must be a native English-speaker and have grown up in Oklahoma (majority of ages 5-18).
In 2020, Dr. Freeman had noticed that some students pronounced some words with a vowel before L (pre-laterals) similarly, like: feel-fill, sale-sell, pull-pole-pool, and dull-dole. We started recording Oklahomans reading some of these words in lists and stories in the lab, but then the pandemic hit, and the lab closed. So, we switched to having people record themselves at home on their phones or computers. This worked great! Over 100 people from all over the state participated, including many who wouldn't have been able to come to the lab in person.
Results so far: Many Oklahomans pronounce words such as "dull, hull, gull, cull" more like "dole, hole, goal, coal," and words such as "pull, full, bull" like "pole, foal, bowl" or even "pool, fool, spool." It looks like there might be an urban/rural difference, with city folk avoiding the "pool, fool, spool" options, but there's too much variation for that to be the whole story. For her thesis, grad student Molly Landers is investigating whether rootedness, or hometown pride, might be a better predictor of which way people pronounce these vowels.
The prelateral question is part of the Oklahoma English Project, and the method of homemade recordings is part of the Remote Recording project, which set out to make sure that recordings from consumer devices and apps were comparable in audio quality to those made on our lab equipment.
Presentations
(*student author)
- Freeman, V. & *Landers, M. (2021, October). Back prelateral mergers in Oklahoma: Variation in production. Poster, New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV), Online.
- Freeman, V. (2021, June). Tips for collecting self-recordings on smartphones. Invited talk, Acoustical Society of America (ASA) spring meeting, Online.
- Freeman, V. & *Landers, M. (2020, September). Prelateral mergers in Oklahoma. Linguistic Association of the Southwest (LASSO), Online.
Related Work
- Part of the Oklahoma English Project
- Data collection method used in the Remote Recording project
Student Corner
Students
- Molly Landers
Available Data
- Recordings of ~113 Oklahomans (age 18-70+) reading words covering the primary American English vowels before coronals, nasals, velars, laterals, and rhotics, plus three short stories including similar words.
- Praat TextGrids that timestamp every word, with vowel and word boundaries hand-corrected.
- Measurements (formants, duration) of vowels before coronals (e.g., /t, d, s/) and /l/.
- Basic demographics of the speakers (age, gender, hometown size, etc.); email addresses for follow-up studies.
- Passages, word lists, consent and demographics in Qualtrics, IRB forms, etc.
Project Ideas: Analyze Existing Data
- Pronunciations of vowels before velars and/or nasals in words like "tag, egg, vague, hang, length, hand." (See the Pevelar Mergers project for ideas.)
- Pronunciations of regional features that distinguish Southern from Midwestern accents, like "pin-pen" merger, "cot-caught" merger, and ay-monophthongization (pronouncing the "eye" vowel more like "ah").
- Vowel duration: might it distinguish vowels that are otherwise pronounced similarly?
- The "shape" of /ay/: some people pronounce "eye" vowels by smoothly tranisitioning between "ah" and "ih," others keep it steady at "ah," but there seems to be a third way to do it in Oklahoma: the first half is a steady "ah" and the second half glides toward "ih," making a trumpet shape on spectrograms. How many people do this? What age/gender/etc? How often? In what kinds of words?
- Social variation by demographic predictors.
Project Ideas: Use Existing Data in New Experiments
- Can Oklahoman listeners distinguish the different /ay/ types? What impressions to they evoke about the speakers?
- Can Oklahoman listeners distinguish words that seem to be merged, or pronounced the same based on vowel measurements? Are they more accurate at pronouncing the differences or hearing them? Are they more or less accurate than non-Oklahomans in perceiving merged (or near-merged) words?
- Reactions of Oklahomans or outsiders to Oklahoman accents.