survey

[Claire Bowern]

Hi everyone,
Some colleagues at the University of Auckland and I are conducting a
survey on North American English and trialling the use of flash web
recording for phonetic analysis. We are doing a short survey
collecting examples of as many different types of American English as
possible. We are aiming for a few thousand responses from all over the
US. We're also aiming to be as representative as possible for age,
gender, geography, ethnicity and class (as representative as we can be
given we're using an internet-based survey system). If you would like
to participate by recording a short wordlist, please visit
http://pantheon.yale.edu/~clb3/NorthAmericanDialects for further
information and instructions. The survey is open to anyone who grew up
speaking English and will take approximately five minutes to complete.
If you could help us spread the word by forwarding this to friends,
family, networks, students, etc, that would be great!

While this is an English survey, I'm posting this on ILAT for two
reasons. One is that I hope our survey will be representative of US
English in all its varieties, and that includes English as spoken by
Native American, First Nations, Alaska Native and other Indigenous
groups. The second (and perhaps more important) is that this survey
will be a large-scale trial of a flash-based web recording program for
phonetic and linguistic research, and that is potentially of relevance
to the work we do here with distance-based language work. I hope to be
able to share some of the results from that side of the project too.
Our trials over the last few months showed that the mp3 format that
we're using it good enough for fairly reliable format tracking,
perhaps formant bandwidth measurement, and duration measurements. In
terms of clarity, it depended heavily of course on microphone
placement and computer volume but on the whole was pretty good -
certainly better than I was expecting.

For any questions regarding this project, please contact Dr. Claire Bowern,
Department of Linguistics, Yale University. Phone: - 203.432.2045,
E-mail: claire.bowern at yale.edu.

Have a good weekend!
Claire