Rachael Allbritten - Academic Research

I have a passion for experimental research and I keep a research diary with a lot of future research question ideas. If you have other ideas that you think would be interesting to research, please email me! I love projects.

Dissertation

I am currently working on my dissertation in Sociolinguistics in the sub-field of Sociolinguistic Variation.  My dissertation explores the connection between clusters of variable features in language and the percept of dialect strength by naïve listeners. I am investigating various phonetic features' relative contribution to the percept of a Southern accent.  A project of this nature  integrates the fields of acoustic production and perception. The data were collected in the Northeastern suburbs of Huntsville, Alabama. 

Working title of the project:“Sounding Southern: Acoustic Realities of Dialect Perceptions.”

There are several subfields within linguistics for which I have training and/or research interests:
English Dialects
Corpus Linguistics using online corpora
Computer programming for Linguistic research, including string manipulation
Sociolinguistics, both General and within the Variationist Tradition
Sociophonetics
Language and Identity
Language Policy in the USA
Endangered Languages
Historical Linguistics

Publications

"The Heart of Dixie is in Their Vowels: The Relationship between Culture and Identity in Hunstville." in Speaking of Alabama, ed. Tom Nunnaly. Alabama University Press. (Forthcoming)


Presentations

"Where do we draw the urban/rural border?: Personal identity and intra-community linguistic variation." Panel presentation for 'On the urban/rural border:  language and identities in a global landscape'. American Anthropological Association (AAA). San Francisco, CA, 2008.

"The Anatomy of a Sociolinguistic Interview." Paper presented at New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) 35, Columbus, OH, 2006

"Automated MT Improvement Through Post-Editing Techniques: Developing an MT Error Taxonomy."  Paper presented at the Association for Machine Translation of the Americas, Cambridge, MA, 2006

"The Southern Vowel Shift in Alabama: The Role of Urban Orientation in Intra-Community Variation."  Paper presented at the South Eastern Conference on Linguistics, Auburn, AL, 2006

Unpublished QP1 - This paper looks at the phenonmenon of forward movement of the low vowel in Southern monophthongal (ay).  Data are gathered in two subprojects. In the first, data are gathered from Sociolinguistic Interviews and auditorily categorized. In the second, data are gathered from the perceptions of naive listeners.