J. Calder | University of Colorado, Boulder (original) (raw)
Papers by J. Calder
Linguistics Vanguard, 2022
This study is part of a larger project investigating whether Zoom is a viable data collection met... more This study is part of a larger project investigating whether Zoom is a viable data collection method for sociophonetic research, examining whether Zoom recordings yield different acoustic measurements than in-person recordings for the exact same speech for 18 speakers. In this article we analyze five spectral measures of sibilants (peak, center of gravity, standard deviation, skewness, and kurtosis) which have been shown to be conditioned by dimensions of identity like speaker gender and sexual orientation in much previous sociolinguistic research. We find that, overall, Zoom recordings yield significantly lower peak, center of gravity, and standard deviation measurements and significantly higher skewness and kurtosis values than in-person recordings for the same speech, likely due to a lower sampling rate on Zoom recordings. However, a preliminary analysis controlling for sampling rate across recording methods reveals the opposite patterns for nearly all measures, suggesting that Zoom stretches the spectral space when compared with the in-person recorder. Because the values of these measurements can lead analysts to draw social interpretations relating to a speaker's performance of gender and sexual identity, we caution against comparing across Zoom and in-person recordings, as differences in measurements may result from the recording method used to collect the data.
Linguistics Vanguard, 2022
In this study, we explore whether Zoom is a viable method for collecting data for sociophonetic r... more In this study, we explore whether Zoom is a viable method for collecting data for sociophonetic research, focusing on vocalic analysis. We investigate whether recordings collected through Zoom yield different acoustic measurements than recordings collected through in-person recording equipment, for the exact same speech. We analyze vowel formant data from 18 speakers who recorded Zoom conversations at the same time as they recorded themselves with portable recording equipment. We find that, overall, Zoom recordings yield lower raw F1 values and higher F2 values than recording equipment. We also tested whether normalization affects discrepancies between recording methods and found that while discrepancies still appear after normalizing with the Watt and Fabricius modified method, Lobanov normalization largely minimizes discrepancies between recording methods. Discrepancies are also mitigated with a Zoom recording setup that involves the speaker wearing headphones and recording with an external microphone.
Journal of Sociolinguistics, 2022
/s/ frontness is one of the most robustly studied linguistic variables in language and gender res... more /s/ frontness is one of the most robustly studied linguistic variables in language and gender research. While much previous literature has established the pattern that women produce fronter /s/ than men, production work on /s/ has either largely focused on White speakers or left speaker race unexplored. This article addresses this gap by examining the production of /s/ among African American and White speakers in Bakersfield, California. While the White speakers exhibit a gender split consonant with previous studies, African American Bakersfieldians exhibit no gender split, with African American men producing /s/ as front as African American women. We argue that African American men in Bakersfield avoid a backed production of /s/ indexical of a White country identity which has historically oppressed them in the area. These production patterns illuminate the importance of an intersectional analysis, taking into account the effect of speaker race on gendered variables like /s/.
Proceedings of the 20th Meeting of the Texas Linguistic Society, 2021
Indexicality is a concept used in sociolinguistics to theorize connections between linguistic sig... more Indexicality is a concept used in sociolinguistics to theorize connections between linguistic signs and the social meanings they carry. In variationism, indexicality is conceptualized as a relationship between a particular linguistic variant and a social meaning, and the linguistic variant may have an indexical field, or a range of meanings with which the variant is able to connect. Social meanings and indexical fields are often conceptualized as belonging to linguistic variants in a dyadic manner, such that the linguistic sign is framed as having a meaning or range of meanings associated with it. However, it is rarely explicitly foregrounded that linguistic features can carry different social meanings, or different indexical fields entirely, for different populations. Here, I discuss the importance of the interpretant in discussions of the ways linguistic signs connect to social meanings. A part of the triadic sign proposed by Charles Sanders Peirce in his original formulation of indexicality (e.g., 1985), the interpretant represents the construal of a connection between a sign and an object (Gal & Irvine 2019) by a perceiver. And different perceivers may make different construals for the same sign-vehicle about what social meanings that sign-vehicle connects to. An exploration of the production patterns of the /s/ sound among marginalized communities illuminates the ditransitive nature of indexicality; that is, linguistic variants may carry different indexical fields for different perceiving populations, conditioned by the local epistemologies within which those perceiving populations are embedded.
Linguistics Vanguard, 2022
In this study, we explore whether Zoom is a viable method for collecting data for sociophonetic r... more In this study, we explore whether Zoom is a viable method for collecting data for sociophonetic research, focusing on vocalic analysis. We investigate whether recordings collected through Zoom yield different acoustic measurements than recordings collected through in-person recording equipment, for the exact same speech. We analyze vowel formant data from 18 speakers who recorded Zoom conversations at the same time as they recorded themselves with portable recording equipment. We find that, overall, Zoom recordings yield lower raw F1 values and higher F2 values than recording equipment. We also tested whether normalization affects discrepancies between recording methods and found that while discrepancies still appear after normalizing with the Watt and Fabricius modified method, Lobanov normalization largely minimizes discrepancies between recording methods. Discrepancies are also mitigated with a Zoom recording setup that involves the speaker wearing headphones and recording with an external microphone.
Keywords: COVID-19; methods; sociophonetics; sound change; Zoom
Gender and Language, 2020
In recent years, the study of language, gender and sexuality has become increasingly global, mult... more In recent years, the study of language, gender and sexuality has become increasingly global, multiracial, intersectional, crosslinguistic and queer-and trans-inclusive. The year 2019 continued this trajectory with a wave of research interrogating normativities, both among the speakers under analysis and among the researchers doing the analysing. While the analysis of linguistic practice has allowed language and gender scholars to probe the ways speakers norma-tively construct and ideologise the prototypical man, woman, gay person and transgender individual, theoretical and methodological advances in 2019 have also invited scholars to interrogate what is considered the prototypical study of language and gender. Interrogating normativities among both speakers and researchers has allowed for theoretical and methodological advances that paint a fuller picture of the multifaceted and context-specific relationship between language, identity and speaker agency.
The Oxford Handbook of Language and Sexuality, 2020
The sound of the queer voice has captured the intrigue of the popular and sociolinguistic imagina... more The sound of the queer voice has captured the intrigue of the popular and sociolinguistic imagination, spurring a wave of research investigating what makes someone “sound gay.” This chapter follows the trajectory of the sociophonetics of LGBTQ+ speakers, focusing on what is perhaps the most robustly studied phonetic variable in queer linguistics: the /s/ sound. The chapter explores how a group of non-normative drag queens in San Francisco use acoustic dimensions of /s/ to project radical queerness, illustrating how this community’s practices bear on greater conversations in sociolinguistics involving the connection between phonetic variation and the articulation of identity.
The International Encyclopedia of Linguistic Anthropology, 2020
Studies of the language of queer speakers – i.e. speakers whose gender and/or sexual identities f... more Studies of the language of queer speakers – i.e. speakers whose gender and/or sexual identities fall outside of the normative heterosexual binary – have followed a trajectory largely mirroring evolutions in the greater field of sociolinguistics. While early sociolinguistic research searched for large‐scale linguistic differences patterning according to broad macro‐social demographic differences, the field in recent decades has increasingly implemented ethnographic, context‐sensitive analyses exploring how individuals use language to construct and project a range of locally meaningful identities on the ground. In the same way, studies of speakers with queer identities were initially concerned with discovering linguistic differences between queer and straight speakers, but have increasingly come to emphasize the diversity of queer voices in various contexts and how these voices contribute to the construction of a range of queer identities.
![Research paper thumbnail of Intersections between race, place, and gender in the production of /s/ [pre-publication version]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/64356875/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics, 2020
Articulation of /s/ has been linked with gender identity in both production (e.g., Podesva & Van ... more Articulation of /s/ has been linked with gender identity in both production (e.g., Podesva & Van Hofwegen 2016, Hazenberg 2012) and perception studies (e.g., Strand 1999), with women producing a fronter /s/ than men, and a fronter /s/ being perceptually linked with femininity. However, this research has been conducted in largely white speech communities, and it remains an open question whether the same gendered patterns exist among African-American communities. We explore /s/ variation in two African-American (AA) communities: Rochester, NY, an urban community in which AAs form a significant portion of the population; and Bakersfield, CA, a non-urban community in which AAs form a small minority. Statistical analyses reveal no gender difference in /s/ articulation among Bakersfield AAs, with men being just as fronted as women. However, a gender pattern exists among Rochester AAs, with women being significantly more fronted than men. These results suggest that patterns linking phonetic variables to gender identities are specific to the communities under analysis, and may be influenced not only by speaker gender, but also by speaker race and geographic location. These patterns illuminate the importance of taking into account multiple intersecting dimensions of identity in studies of phonetic variation, as broad trends established for one group of speakers may not account for the complexity of how speakers of different demographic groups in different regions phonetically articulate gender identity.
Publication of the American Dialect Society 105, 2020
Previous sociolinguistic research has described two distinct types of BOOT-fronting: Southern fro... more Previous sociolinguistic research has described two distinct types of BOOT-fronting: Southern fronting and Western fronting (e.g., Koops 2010, Hall-Lew 2004). Southern fronting has been described as relatively monopthongal with a small F2 movement over the course of the vowel, while Western fronting has been described as dipthongal, with a larger magnitude F2 movement in a negative direction. We examine the nature of BOOT-fronting among African-Americans in Bakersfield, California. While previous work (King & Calder forthcoming) has found that Bakersfield African-Americans front to the same degree as their White counterparts, we explore the directionality and magnitude of formant movement in order to assess whether Bakersfield African-Americans exhibit patterns closer to Southern or Western fronting. We find that while Bakersfield African-Americans exhibit a relatively monophthongal realization of BOOT— consonant with Southern fronting— the movement of F2 is in a negative direction— consonant with Western fronting. In other words, trajectory patterns illuminate a variant that is somewhere in between the two previously described patterns, allowing Bakersfield African-Americans to index place identity with BOOT frontness, while still maintaining a distinction from the BOOT-fronting described for Anglo speakers in the West.
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 2019
This paper explores the relation between the linguistic and the visual in indexing social meaning... more This paper explores the relation between the linguistic and the visual in indexing social meaning and performing gender, focusing on fronted /s/ among a community of drag queens in SoMa, San Francisco. I argue that as orders of indexicality (Silverstein 2003) are established, linguistic features like fronted /s/ become linked with visual bodies. These body-language links can impose top-down restrictions on the uptake of gender performances. Non-normatively gendered individuals like the SoMa queens embody cross-modal figures of personhood (see Agha 2003, 2004) like the fierce queen that forge higher indexical orders and widen the range of performative agency.
Language in Society, 2019
This article explores the roles that language and the body play in the iconization of cross-modal... more This article explores the roles that language and the body play in the iconization of cross-modal personae (see Agha 2003, 2004). Focusing on a community of radical drag queens in San Francisco, I analyze the interplay of visual presentation and acoustic dimensions of /s/ in the construction of the fierce queen persona, which embodies an extreme, larger-than-life, and anti-normative type of femininity. Taking data from transformations-conversations during which queens visually transform from male-presenting into their feminine drag personae-- I explore the effect of fluid visual presentation on linguistic production, and argue that changes in both the linguistic and visual streams increasingly invoke qualia (see Gal 2013; Harkness 2015) projecting 'harshness' and 'sharpness' in the construction of fierce femininity. I argue that personae like the fierce queen become iconized through rhematization (see Gal 2013), a process in which qualic congruences are construed and constructed across multiple semiotic modalities.
Linguistics Vanguard, 2022
This study is part of a larger project investigating whether Zoom is a viable data collection met... more This study is part of a larger project investigating whether Zoom is a viable data collection method for sociophonetic research, examining whether Zoom recordings yield different acoustic measurements than in-person recordings for the exact same speech for 18 speakers. In this article we analyze five spectral measures of sibilants (peak, center of gravity, standard deviation, skewness, and kurtosis) which have been shown to be conditioned by dimensions of identity like speaker gender and sexual orientation in much previous sociolinguistic research. We find that, overall, Zoom recordings yield significantly lower peak, center of gravity, and standard deviation measurements and significantly higher skewness and kurtosis values than in-person recordings for the same speech, likely due to a lower sampling rate on Zoom recordings. However, a preliminary analysis controlling for sampling rate across recording methods reveals the opposite patterns for nearly all measures, suggesting that Zoom stretches the spectral space when compared with the in-person recorder. Because the values of these measurements can lead analysts to draw social interpretations relating to a speaker's performance of gender and sexual identity, we caution against comparing across Zoom and in-person recordings, as differences in measurements may result from the recording method used to collect the data.
Linguistics Vanguard, 2022
In this study, we explore whether Zoom is a viable method for collecting data for sociophonetic r... more In this study, we explore whether Zoom is a viable method for collecting data for sociophonetic research, focusing on vocalic analysis. We investigate whether recordings collected through Zoom yield different acoustic measurements than recordings collected through in-person recording equipment, for the exact same speech. We analyze vowel formant data from 18 speakers who recorded Zoom conversations at the same time as they recorded themselves with portable recording equipment. We find that, overall, Zoom recordings yield lower raw F1 values and higher F2 values than recording equipment. We also tested whether normalization affects discrepancies between recording methods and found that while discrepancies still appear after normalizing with the Watt and Fabricius modified method, Lobanov normalization largely minimizes discrepancies between recording methods. Discrepancies are also mitigated with a Zoom recording setup that involves the speaker wearing headphones and recording with an external microphone.
Journal of Sociolinguistics, 2022
/s/ frontness is one of the most robustly studied linguistic variables in language and gender res... more /s/ frontness is one of the most robustly studied linguistic variables in language and gender research. While much previous literature has established the pattern that women produce fronter /s/ than men, production work on /s/ has either largely focused on White speakers or left speaker race unexplored. This article addresses this gap by examining the production of /s/ among African American and White speakers in Bakersfield, California. While the White speakers exhibit a gender split consonant with previous studies, African American Bakersfieldians exhibit no gender split, with African American men producing /s/ as front as African American women. We argue that African American men in Bakersfield avoid a backed production of /s/ indexical of a White country identity which has historically oppressed them in the area. These production patterns illuminate the importance of an intersectional analysis, taking into account the effect of speaker race on gendered variables like /s/.
Proceedings of the 20th Meeting of the Texas Linguistic Society, 2021
Indexicality is a concept used in sociolinguistics to theorize connections between linguistic sig... more Indexicality is a concept used in sociolinguistics to theorize connections between linguistic signs and the social meanings they carry. In variationism, indexicality is conceptualized as a relationship between a particular linguistic variant and a social meaning, and the linguistic variant may have an indexical field, or a range of meanings with which the variant is able to connect. Social meanings and indexical fields are often conceptualized as belonging to linguistic variants in a dyadic manner, such that the linguistic sign is framed as having a meaning or range of meanings associated with it. However, it is rarely explicitly foregrounded that linguistic features can carry different social meanings, or different indexical fields entirely, for different populations. Here, I discuss the importance of the interpretant in discussions of the ways linguistic signs connect to social meanings. A part of the triadic sign proposed by Charles Sanders Peirce in his original formulation of indexicality (e.g., 1985), the interpretant represents the construal of a connection between a sign and an object (Gal & Irvine 2019) by a perceiver. And different perceivers may make different construals for the same sign-vehicle about what social meanings that sign-vehicle connects to. An exploration of the production patterns of the /s/ sound among marginalized communities illuminates the ditransitive nature of indexicality; that is, linguistic variants may carry different indexical fields for different perceiving populations, conditioned by the local epistemologies within which those perceiving populations are embedded.
Linguistics Vanguard, 2022
In this study, we explore whether Zoom is a viable method for collecting data for sociophonetic r... more In this study, we explore whether Zoom is a viable method for collecting data for sociophonetic research, focusing on vocalic analysis. We investigate whether recordings collected through Zoom yield different acoustic measurements than recordings collected through in-person recording equipment, for the exact same speech. We analyze vowel formant data from 18 speakers who recorded Zoom conversations at the same time as they recorded themselves with portable recording equipment. We find that, overall, Zoom recordings yield lower raw F1 values and higher F2 values than recording equipment. We also tested whether normalization affects discrepancies between recording methods and found that while discrepancies still appear after normalizing with the Watt and Fabricius modified method, Lobanov normalization largely minimizes discrepancies between recording methods. Discrepancies are also mitigated with a Zoom recording setup that involves the speaker wearing headphones and recording with an external microphone.
Keywords: COVID-19; methods; sociophonetics; sound change; Zoom
Gender and Language, 2020
In recent years, the study of language, gender and sexuality has become increasingly global, mult... more In recent years, the study of language, gender and sexuality has become increasingly global, multiracial, intersectional, crosslinguistic and queer-and trans-inclusive. The year 2019 continued this trajectory with a wave of research interrogating normativities, both among the speakers under analysis and among the researchers doing the analysing. While the analysis of linguistic practice has allowed language and gender scholars to probe the ways speakers norma-tively construct and ideologise the prototypical man, woman, gay person and transgender individual, theoretical and methodological advances in 2019 have also invited scholars to interrogate what is considered the prototypical study of language and gender. Interrogating normativities among both speakers and researchers has allowed for theoretical and methodological advances that paint a fuller picture of the multifaceted and context-specific relationship between language, identity and speaker agency.
The Oxford Handbook of Language and Sexuality, 2020
The sound of the queer voice has captured the intrigue of the popular and sociolinguistic imagina... more The sound of the queer voice has captured the intrigue of the popular and sociolinguistic imagination, spurring a wave of research investigating what makes someone “sound gay.” This chapter follows the trajectory of the sociophonetics of LGBTQ+ speakers, focusing on what is perhaps the most robustly studied phonetic variable in queer linguistics: the /s/ sound. The chapter explores how a group of non-normative drag queens in San Francisco use acoustic dimensions of /s/ to project radical queerness, illustrating how this community’s practices bear on greater conversations in sociolinguistics involving the connection between phonetic variation and the articulation of identity.
The International Encyclopedia of Linguistic Anthropology, 2020
Studies of the language of queer speakers – i.e. speakers whose gender and/or sexual identities f... more Studies of the language of queer speakers – i.e. speakers whose gender and/or sexual identities fall outside of the normative heterosexual binary – have followed a trajectory largely mirroring evolutions in the greater field of sociolinguistics. While early sociolinguistic research searched for large‐scale linguistic differences patterning according to broad macro‐social demographic differences, the field in recent decades has increasingly implemented ethnographic, context‐sensitive analyses exploring how individuals use language to construct and project a range of locally meaningful identities on the ground. In the same way, studies of speakers with queer identities were initially concerned with discovering linguistic differences between queer and straight speakers, but have increasingly come to emphasize the diversity of queer voices in various contexts and how these voices contribute to the construction of a range of queer identities.
University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics, 2020
Articulation of /s/ has been linked with gender identity in both production (e.g., Podesva & Van ... more Articulation of /s/ has been linked with gender identity in both production (e.g., Podesva & Van Hofwegen 2016, Hazenberg 2012) and perception studies (e.g., Strand 1999), with women producing a fronter /s/ than men, and a fronter /s/ being perceptually linked with femininity. However, this research has been conducted in largely white speech communities, and it remains an open question whether the same gendered patterns exist among African-American communities. We explore /s/ variation in two African-American (AA) communities: Rochester, NY, an urban community in which AAs form a significant portion of the population; and Bakersfield, CA, a non-urban community in which AAs form a small minority. Statistical analyses reveal no gender difference in /s/ articulation among Bakersfield AAs, with men being just as fronted as women. However, a gender pattern exists among Rochester AAs, with women being significantly more fronted than men. These results suggest that patterns linking phonetic variables to gender identities are specific to the communities under analysis, and may be influenced not only by speaker gender, but also by speaker race and geographic location. These patterns illuminate the importance of taking into account multiple intersecting dimensions of identity in studies of phonetic variation, as broad trends established for one group of speakers may not account for the complexity of how speakers of different demographic groups in different regions phonetically articulate gender identity.
Publication of the American Dialect Society 105, 2020
Previous sociolinguistic research has described two distinct types of BOOT-fronting: Southern fro... more Previous sociolinguistic research has described two distinct types of BOOT-fronting: Southern fronting and Western fronting (e.g., Koops 2010, Hall-Lew 2004). Southern fronting has been described as relatively monopthongal with a small F2 movement over the course of the vowel, while Western fronting has been described as dipthongal, with a larger magnitude F2 movement in a negative direction. We examine the nature of BOOT-fronting among African-Americans in Bakersfield, California. While previous work (King & Calder forthcoming) has found that Bakersfield African-Americans front to the same degree as their White counterparts, we explore the directionality and magnitude of formant movement in order to assess whether Bakersfield African-Americans exhibit patterns closer to Southern or Western fronting. We find that while Bakersfield African-Americans exhibit a relatively monophthongal realization of BOOT— consonant with Southern fronting— the movement of F2 is in a negative direction— consonant with Western fronting. In other words, trajectory patterns illuminate a variant that is somewhere in between the two previously described patterns, allowing Bakersfield African-Americans to index place identity with BOOT frontness, while still maintaining a distinction from the BOOT-fronting described for Anglo speakers in the West.
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 2019
This paper explores the relation between the linguistic and the visual in indexing social meaning... more This paper explores the relation between the linguistic and the visual in indexing social meaning and performing gender, focusing on fronted /s/ among a community of drag queens in SoMa, San Francisco. I argue that as orders of indexicality (Silverstein 2003) are established, linguistic features like fronted /s/ become linked with visual bodies. These body-language links can impose top-down restrictions on the uptake of gender performances. Non-normatively gendered individuals like the SoMa queens embody cross-modal figures of personhood (see Agha 2003, 2004) like the fierce queen that forge higher indexical orders and widen the range of performative agency.
Language in Society, 2019
This article explores the roles that language and the body play in the iconization of cross-modal... more This article explores the roles that language and the body play in the iconization of cross-modal personae (see Agha 2003, 2004). Focusing on a community of radical drag queens in San Francisco, I analyze the interplay of visual presentation and acoustic dimensions of /s/ in the construction of the fierce queen persona, which embodies an extreme, larger-than-life, and anti-normative type of femininity. Taking data from transformations-conversations during which queens visually transform from male-presenting into their feminine drag personae-- I explore the effect of fluid visual presentation on linguistic production, and argue that changes in both the linguistic and visual streams increasingly invoke qualia (see Gal 2013; Harkness 2015) projecting 'harshness' and 'sharpness' in the construction of fierce femininity. I argue that personae like the fierce queen become iconized through rhematization (see Gal 2013), a process in which qualic congruences are construed and constructed across multiple semiotic modalities.