Acoustic and visual properties of vowels in Oakland CA: Preliminary results

The “Voices of Oakland” project aims to create a large audiovisual corpus of conversational speech produced by people who were born and raised in Oakland, California. To date, we have hour long recordings from about 50 people ranging in age from 19 to 101, and spanning all races and economic strata of this diverse city. In this report, we describe the corpus design and some of our methodological decisions in collecting and analyzing audiovisual data and then discuss some preliminary findings regarding back vowel fronting, a widespread sound change that is also a primary component of the California Vowel Shift. Preliminary analysis suggests that the typical GOOSE fronting ascribed to California English is, for these speakers, stylistically variable and may be a marker of social status. The paper will also present data on lip posture during vowels, exploring the role of lip spreading in the raising of F2 in back vowel fronting.