Sky Onosson

University of Victoria | UVIC · Department of Linguistics (Faculty of Social Sciences)

The literature on Canadian English provides evidence of distinct dialect regions. Within this landscape, the province of British Columbia is set apart as a sub-region in the west, yet information concerning “local” English is notably skewed toward a single urban setting, Vancouver. To assess and extend the generalizability of prior observations, th...

“Canadian Raising” (CR) is a phonological process typical of Canadian English, defined as the production of /aj, aw/ with raised nuclei before voiceless codas, e.g. in about. This dissertation investigates the relationship between CR and another process which abbreviates vowels in the same phonological context in most English dialects: pre- voicele...

This study of Media Lengua examines production differences between mid and high vowels in order to identify the major correlates that distinguish these vowel types. The Media Lengua vowel system is unusual in that it incorporates lexical items originating in Spanish's five-vowel system into a three-vowel system inherited from Quichua, resulting in...

This study examines production of the vowels /æ/, /ɛ/, and /e/ among three different English-speaking ethnic populations in Manitoba, Canada, focusing on patterns of raising and vowel overlap in prevelar contexts. Although raising of /æ/ before /ɡ/ has been documented for the Prairies region of Canada generally, its specific occurrence in Manitoba...

This paper provides an acoustic description of /z/ and /z ʕ / in Tŝilhqot’in (Northern Dene). These sounds are noted by Cook (1993, 2013) to show lenition and some degree of laterality in coda position. Based on recordings made in 2014 with a single, mother-tongue speaker of Tŝilhqot’in, we describe their acoustic properties and examine their distr...

This study investigates a phenomenon of morphemespecific vowel raising that occurs in some Ecuadorian dialects of Quichua as well as the associated mixed language Media Lengua, where certain forms of /a/ are pronounced as [u]. Our data reveal that this process is region-specific, occurring in the Quichua dialect spoken in Cotopaxi province, but not...

Although Media Lengua was first documented by linguists in Ecuador’s Cotopaxi province, this study represents the first phonetic account of Media Lengua vowel production in that region, as subsequent research on Media Lengua has focused exclusively on the variety spoken in Imbabura province. This preliminary case study reveals that Cotopaxi speaker...

PREPRINT: This paper provides an acoustic description of /z/ and /zʕ/ in Tŝilhqot’in (Northern Dene). These sounds are noted by Cook (1993, 2013) to show lenition and some degree of laterality in coda position. Based on recordings made in 2014 with a single, mother-tongue speaker of Tŝilhqot’in, we describe their acoustic properties and examine t...

INTRODUCTION: This study investigates the production of the phonological process known as “prevelar raising” or “bag-raising” among English speakers in the province of Manitoba. Under prevelar raising, the vowel /æ/ in bag or similar words having a final /ɡ/ is raised to a higher position in acoustic space. This process has been documented in sever...

An examination of reduction/erosion processes as part of grammaticalization effects in the use of Brazilian Portuguese "tipo".

NOW OPEN-ACCESS PUBLISHED IN LABORATORY PHONOLOGY; PLEASE REFERENCE THE PUBLISHED VERSION: https://doi.org/10.5334/labphon.291 This study of Media Lengua examines production differences between mid and high vowels in order to identify the major correlates that distinguish these vowel types. The Media Lengua vowel system is unusual in that it incor...

Media Lengua (ML), a mixed language derived from Quichua and Spanish, exhibits a phonological system that largely conforms to that of Quichua acoustically. Yet, it incorporates a large number of vowel sequences from Spanish which do not occur in the Quichua system. This includes the use of mid-vowels, which are phonetically realized in ML as largel...

NOW OPEN-ACCESS PUBLISHED IN LANGUAGE AND SPEECH; PLEASE REFERENCE THE PUBLISHED VERSION: https://doi.org/10.1177/00238309211014911 Media Lengua (ML), a mixed language derived from Quichua and Spanish, exhibits a phonological system that largely conforms to that of Quichua acoustically. Yet, it incorporates a large number of vowel sequences from S...

This paper examines the acoustic properties of Hul'q'umi'num' vowel-glide sequences [ej, ew] as well as short and long [e, eː], comparing pronunciations of a single L1 Hul'q'umi'num' speaker to those of a group of fifteen L2 speakers. Generalized Additive Models (GAMs), which permit statistical comparisons of non-linear data such as transitional fo...

The acoustic qualities of the Canadian Shift vowels /ae, ɛ, ɪ/ were examined among two ethnically distinct populations in Winnipeg, Canada: speakers of Filipino ancestry, and non-Filipino "white" Canadians. Results indicate that ethnic Filipinos participate more strongly in the Canadian Shift, indicated by greater retraction and/or lowering of the...

Analysis of acoustic trajectories of Canadian diphthongs with implications for articulatory production

Introduction Our poster reports on an ongoing project investigating linguistic (speech) variation among public school students in Rio de Janeiro (2015 metro pop. 12,280,702), attended mostly by children from lower socioeconomic status households. For the initial stage, we have focused on the creation of the first corpus of spontaneous speech from s...

Analysis of variation in yod production in Victoria

The literature on Canadian English (CanE) provides mounting evidence of ongoing dialect differentiation (Labov et al. 2006; Boberg 2008, 2010). In British Columbia, however, information concerning ‘local’ English is notably skewed toward Vancouver, misrepresenting the cultural landscape of the province. This paper compares five vocalic features in...

Ethnicity has only recently begun to be investigated as a factor in variation in Canadian English. Our study investigates the heritage Filipino population in Winnipeg, Canada, an important yet previously unstudied group in the city. Statistical models reveal that ethnicity is a strongly significant factor across several dimensions. Filipino Winnipe...

Information concerning the ecology of English in British Columbia (BC) is remarkably impoverished. BC has been categorized as a dialect region largely based on data from Vancouver, a city that is socially, historically, economically, and culturally distinct from others in the province. This paper addresses the degree to which the vowel system of Vi...

This paper examines the phonological process of Canadian Raising, arguing that it is better understood as an allophonic difference of phonetic duration rather than vowel quality or height, as per most traditional accounts. A prosodic model is proposed in order to account for the aforementioned factors of duration and timing. The proposed model is i...

This paper examines the phonological process of Canadian Raising, arguing that it is better understood as an allophonic difference of phonetic duration rather than vowel quality or height, as per most traditional accounts. A prosodic model is proposed in order to account for the aforementioned factors of duration and timing. The proposed model is i...

Methodology for analyzing complex vowel articulations

This thesis examines the occurrence of Canadian Raising in Manitoba, using acoustic-spectral analysis. Factors such as lexical frequency and morphological complexity are examined to determine their role in Canadian Raising production within the sample population. One of the key findings is that what are usually analyzed as “raised” phones in pre-vo...