Scholars@Duke
Tyler Kendall

Tyler Kendall

Assist Dir, Special Projects
Duke University
tyler.kendall@law.duke.edu
Box 104423, Durham, NC 27701
Duke Law School, Box 104423, 1121 West Chapel Hill St., Suite 201, Durham, NC 27701

Selected Publications

Exploring the anatomy of articulation rate in spontaneous English speech: relationships between utterance length effects and social factors

Conference Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH · January 1, 2024 Speech rate has been shown to vary across social categories such as gender, age, and dialect, while also being conditioned by properties of speech planning. The effect of utterance length, where speech rate is faster and less variable for longer utterances ... Full text Cite

Quantification of stylistic differences in human- and ASR-produced transcripts of African American English

Conference Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH · January 1, 2024 Common measures of accuracy used to assess the performance of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems, as well as human transcribers, conflate multiple sources of error. Stylistic differences, such as verbatim vs non-verbatim, can play a significant rol ... Full text Cite

Advancements of phonetics in the 21st century: Theoretical issues in sociophonetics

Journal Article Journal of Phonetics · May 1, 2023 Variation in speech has always been important to phonetic theory, but takes center stage in the growing area of sociophonetics, which places the role of the social at the heart of the theoretical and methodological enterprise. This paper provides a compreh ... Full text Cite

Sociophonetics and speech rate and pause

Chapter · January 1, 2023 Speech rate and pause are aspects of prosody with great potential for sociophonetic research. They are features that have been examined in diverse ways over the years, often yielding sociophonetically relevant observations, but only rarely have they been e ... Full text Cite

Contextualizing /s/ retraction: Sibilant variation and change in Washington D.C. African American Language

Journal Article Language Variation and Change · October 1, 2021 Recent work has demonstrated an ongoing change across varieties of English in which /s/ retracts before consonants, particularly before /tE/ clusters (e.g., Lawrence, 2000; Shapiro, 1995; Stuart-Smith et al., 2019). Much of this work has focused on the soc ... Full text Cite

Considering Performance in the Automated and Manual Coding of Sociolinguistic Variables: Lessons From Variable (ING)

Journal Article Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence · April 29, 2021 Impressionistic coding of sociolinguistic variables like English (ING), the alternation between pronunciations like talkin' and talking, has been a central part of the analytic workflow in studies of language variation and change for over a half-century. T ... Full text Cite

Sociophonetics

Book · March 11, 2021 A concise introduction to sociophonetics, this book links research in sociolinguistics, phonetics, speech sciences, and psycholinguistics. ... Cite

Exploring vowel formant estimation through simulation-based techniques

Journal Article Linguistics Vanguard · January 1, 2020 This paper contributes insight into the sources of variability in vowel formant estimation, a major analytic activity in sociophonetics, by reviewing the outcomes of two simulations that manipulated the settings used for linear predictive coding (LPC)-base ... Full text Cite

Perceiving Southernness: Vowel categories and acoustic cues in Southernness ratings.

Journal Article The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · January 2020 Southern U.S. speech has been the focus of much sociophonetic work. In terms of vowel patterns, Southern speech is often characterized by the Southern Vowel Shift (SVS, involving shifts in /e/, /ɛ/, and /aɪ/), back vowel fronting, and changes in glide dyna ... Full text Cite

Stylistically coherent variants: Cognitive representation of social meaning / Variantes estilisticamente coerentes: representação cognitiva de significados sociais

Journal Article REVISTA DE ESTUDOS DA LINGUAGEM · October 11, 2019 Abstract: The perception of social meanings and styles is dependent upon the contributions of a constellation of multiple covarying sociolinguistic variants. This suggests that listeners maintain associations between stylistically coherent variants ... Full text Cite

Stylistically coherent variants: Cognitive representation of social meaning

Journal Article Revista de Estudos da Linguagem · January 1, 2019 The perception of social meanings and styles is dependent upon the contributions of a constellation of multiple covarying sociolinguistic variants. This suggests that listeners maintain associations between stylistically coherent variants and their social ... Full text Cite

Listener sensitivity to probabilistic conditioning of sociolinguistic variables: The case of (ING)

Journal Article Journal of Memory and Language · December 1, 2018 This paper investigates the extent to which listeners are cued into the systematicity of variability in speech, particularly the grammatical conditioning constraints of the English sociolinguistic variable (ING) (e.g., talking vs. talkin). Listeners’ sensi ... Full text Cite

Vowel dynamics in the southern vowel shift

Journal Article American Speech · May 1, 2018 Southern varieties of English are known to be affected by the Southern Vowel Shift (SVS), which alters the positional relationship between the front tense/ lax system. However, previous work on the SVS generally limits its focus to steady state formant mea ... Full text Cite

Regional identity and listener perception

Chapter · January 1, 2018 As numerous chapters in this volume explore, better understanding the perception of linguistic variation is crucial to a range of sociolinguistic enterprises, including the larger goal of uncovering the principles underlying sound change. In previous resea ... Full text Cite

Regional relationships among the low vowels of U.S. English: Evidence from production and perception

Journal Article Language Variation and Change · July 1, 2017 The unconditioned merger of the low back vowels and the variety of realizations found for the low front vowel have been noted as leading to greater distinctiveness across U.S. English regional dialects. The extent to which the movements of these vowels are ... Full text Cite

Western United States

Chapter · January 1, 2017 Full text Cite

Engagement through data management and preservation: The North Carolina language and life project and the sociolinguistic archive and analysis project

Chapter · January 1, 2016 This chapter considers the ways that enhanced data management and preservation practices improve linguistic engagement processes and procedures. Data management and engagement are often considered separate professional enterprises with different goals and ... Full text Cite

Archiving and Managing Sociolinguistic Data: The Problems of Portability, Access and Security, and Discoverability and Relevance

Journal Article Language and Linguistics Compass · November 1, 2014 In recent years, sociolinguists have become increasingly focused on and more explicit about ensuring the preservation, and accessibility, of their data. This increased focus on our data has involved new lines of work explicitly on data management and, in t ... Full text Cite

Durational and spectral differences in American English vowels: dialect variation within and across regions.

Journal Article The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · July 2014 Spectral differences among varieties of American English have been widely studied, typically recognizing three major regionally diagnostic vowel shift patterns [Labov, Ash, and Boberg (2006). The Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology and So ... Full text Cite

The role of duration in regional U.S. vowel shifts

Conference Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics · June 19, 2013 Contemporary American dialect research has produced a rich body of literature on phonetic differences in vowel production. Many studies have focused on contrasting shifts occurring in the speech of Northerners and Southerners. While such research clearly s ... Full text Cite

Speech rate, pause, and sociolinguistic variation: Studies in Corpus sociophonetics

Book · January 1, 2013 This book provides a fascinating account of the psycholinguistic and social factors behind variation in speech timing in US English. With detailed discussions of its methods and data, it also acts as a valuable model for conducting corpus (socio)phonetic r ... Full text Cite

Data preservation and access

Chapter · January 1, 2013 Full text Cite

Exploring the relationship between production and perception in the mid front vowels of U.S. English

Journal Article Lingua · May 1, 2012 A combined vowel perception/vowel production study was designed to address the question of how variability in speech production relates to variability in speech perception. For the study, participants from three different U.S. dialect regions (North, South ... Full text Cite

Variation in perception and production of mid front vowels in the U.S. Southern Vowel Shift

Journal Article Journal of Phonetics · March 1, 2012 Looking at speech perception from a sociolinguistic perspective, the paper first explores how speakers from three different regions in the U.S. perform on a vowel identification task for a continuum between /e/ and /e{open}/. Following the general analysis ... Full text Cite

The dative alternation in African American English: Researching syntactic variation and change across sociolinguistic datasets

Journal Article Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory · October 1, 2011 Recent research has shown the dative alternation in English to be a productive arena for examining the relationship between group-level variation and the internalization of individuals' grammars. Experimental methods (e.g., Bresnan and Ford, Language 86: 1 ... Full text Cite

Corpus linguistics and sociolinguistic inquiry: Introduction to special issue

Journal Article Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory · May 1, 2011 Full text Cite

Local and external language standards in African American English

Journal Article Journal of English Linguistics · December 1, 2009 This investigation attempts to determine the social distribution and contextual shifting of African American English (AAE) within rural Southern African American communities. The study compares selective diagnostic AAE variables and features of speech rate ... Full text Cite

On the history and future of sociolinguistic data

Journal Article Linguistics and Language Compass · January 1, 2008 Recordings of natural speech play a central role in the diverse subdisciplines of linguistics. The reliance on speech recordings is especially profound in sociolinguistics, where scholars have developed a range of techniques for eliciting and analyzing nat ... Full text Cite

The message is the message: Designing information technology for inclusiveness and accessibility

Conference International Symposium on Technology and Society · January 1, 2002 Universal design advocates designing virtual as well as physical environments to be accessible and usable by as many potential users as possible. However, dominant ways of thinking about accessibility and information technology, and the resulting design an ... Cite