Yateraw Gwiding

The December 2007 issue of Language arrived while we were packing for our trip to visit Mom and Dad. I glanced at the contents and some abstracts, figuring I’d read more when we got back. The first article: “Positional neutralization: A case study from child language,” by Sharon Inkelas and Yvan Rose. When I looked at the abstract, I realized this article couldn’t wait for us to get back from our trip; it would have to go in my carryon bag for the plane. It was about a child they referred to as E, who from the ages of about one and a half to three years exhibited … lateral gliding.

Lateral gliding, you say?

Yes, lateral gliding! Lateral is the phonetic term for /l/ sounds, and glide is a term referring to vowel-like consonants such as [y] and [w]. (They’re also known as approximants.) Lateral gliding, then, is the pronunciation of /l/s as [w]s and [y]s. Sound familiar?

Maybe you remember a few years ago, when I wrote about how Doug pronounced his /l/s until he was about six years old. Sometimes he’d say them as [y], sometimes as [w]. (BTW, I should mention that I’m using a corrupt version of the International Phonetic Alphabet here. Technically, the consonant y sound is written as [j]. The j sound, meanwhile, is written [ʤ]. But for consistency with the posts I’m linking to here, and to lessen confusion for my nonlinguist readers, I’m representing the y sound as [y].) I was dissatisfied with my own analysis of the rule describing when Doug would produce a [y] and when he’d produce a [w]; another linguist had a better one, but I was naturally curious about what a paper in a scholarly journal would have to say on the subject. This wasn’t academic; it was personal.

It Was Never Said Anything About

Last month, I said in one of my posts that it sounded like Ira Glass, host of “This American Life”, had a uvular /l/. Justin “Semantic Compositions” Busch decided to hear for himself, and after doing so commented, “I can convince myself that I hear the uvular nasal when Ira Glass says his name at the 25:48 mark in the 1/5/07 broadcast, but most of the tokens of his /l/ don’t trigger that sensation for me at all.”

Since that time I’ve listened to a lot more of the weekly podcasts and archived MP3s (they’re somewhat addictive, even though they’re not all equally interesting), and I’m sticking with my call. The uvular /l/ is most perceptible at the beginning of words and in word-initial consonant clusters, not quite so much so intervocalically (between vowels), and hardly at all word-finally. If, like Busch, you want to hear some of these uvular /l/s for yourself, you can browse episodes to listen to here.

One of the more interesting episodes is “Family Legend”. As a bonus,

LSA 2007: L and S at the ~

The Tensor is giving other LSA highlights, including the third annual bloggers’ gathering that happened on Friday night. It was fun; as he mentions, we got to meet Justin “Semantic Compositions” Busch in person, plus we saw the Tensor himself with non-purple hair. But I don’t want to talk about that. Conversation topics included how to make the best conlang ever, assuming you’d want to, and how to incorporate learning a language (or as Mark Liberman suggested, chemistry or other things) into a really cool videogame. And I put in a plug for my own Literal-Minded Linguistics Supplement. But enough about Friday night; I want to talk about Saturday night, when (now former) LSA president Sally McConnell-Ginet delivered the presidential address. The Tensor mentions his most memorable moment from the talk: when McConnell-Ginet spilled water on her PC. After she’d hastily mopped off her keyboard, recovered her composure, and continued with her talk, he and Included Middle were muttering things like, “She’s got about a minute, and then her motherboard’s fried.”

However, a friend whom I’ll call Rebecca that I talked to later that evening found something else about the talk memorable. It drove her crazy, she said, how McConnell-Ginet would often exhibit a sociophonetic variation that Rebecca sometimes observed in women’s (and only women’s) speech: a labialized /s/. That is, when she said her /s/, she would simultaneously round her lips as if to say a /w/. “Now far be it from me,” Rebecca said, “to condemn someone’s linguistic variation,” but it was still distracting, because McConnell-Ginet didn’t produce labialized /s/ consistently, or in some patterned way. Sometimes she’d produce a labialized /s/, other times a regular one; that was what really got under Rebecca’s skin. Oh, and about the talk itself? Ah, it was something about words and meaning. You can read the abstract on page 69 of the meeting handbook if you’re interested.

Hearing about this variant pronunciation of /s/ reminded me that on the shuttle from the airport on Thursday night, I’d heard another speaker who, like Adam, me as a kid, Stephen King sometimes, and possibly Tom Brokaw, pronounces his /l/ as the uvular nasal [N]. It was a three- free-year-old boy going to visit Disneyland with his parents, or as he put it, Disney[N]and. And that reminded me of yet another celebrity I’d heard using [N] for /l/: Ira Glass, host of NPR’s This American Life. I’ve started downloading episodes of this program and listening to them on my iPod, and after a couple of hours of listening, I was pretty sure that he was saying “Ira G[N]ass” and “This American [N]ife.” Fortunately, most of the program is other people telling their stories, and the stories are usually really interesting, enough to mitigate the distraction of Ira Glass’s uvular /l/s. Why don’t you listen to a few episodes yourself and tell me what you think of his /l/s? Actually, I’d recommend listening even if you don’t care at all about his /l/s.

They Call Their Yellow Lellow…

Not too long after I blogged about uvular /l/, I asked the speech-language pathologist at Adam and Doug’s school about it, while we watched Adam’s class play in the wading pools for “water day.” She’d never listened to Tom Brokaw enough to notice his /l/s, but another parent who was there said she couldn’t even stand to listen to him because he “swallows his Ls.” Then the three of us practiced making uvular /l/s, and if I do say so myself, mine were the best, what with my extensive childhool experience of making them.

Totally Uvular

When I was about five years old, Mom would sometimes tell me that I “swallowed my Ls,” and I never knew what she was talking about. I had never felt an /l/ sound go down my throat and into my tummy. Mom would demonstrate a proper /l/, and though I could hear that her /l/ and mine were somehow different, I couldn’t figure out what the difference was. At about age 6 I finally figured out how to make an English /l, but even so, it wasn’t until I took a phonetics course in college that I learned precisely what I had been doing when I “swallowed” my /l/s: I had been producing a uvular nasal consonant (represented as [N] in the International Phonetic Alphabet), by putting the back of my tongue up to my uvula, turning on my voice (”phonating”), and letting air come out my nose as I would for an /m/, /n/, or /ŋ/ (”ng”).

Until recently, I was the only one I knew who’d had that particular pronunciation error, but then Karen Chung reported hearing it in Stephen King’s speech. More recently still, I became aware that Tom Brokaw is often lampooned for his /l/ pronunciation. I listened to Brokaw’s interview of New York Public Radio’s Leonard Lopate here, and it sounds like he might be using a uvular nasal for an /l/, too. And most recently of all, Adam has stopped pronouncing his /l/s as [w] or [n] as he was doing a year and a half ago (see here), to follow in my footsteps by switching to [N].

Where will the uvular /l/ turn up next? Maybe in your neighborhood.

Stephen King: Horror Master, /l/ Uvularizer, Overnegator

In a recent posting on the Linguist List (hat tip to phonoloblog’s Eric Bakovic) Karen Chung tells about hearing Stephen King in an interview pronouncing some of his /l/s as uvular nasal consonants, just like I did when I was a kid:

I had trouble with my /l/, too; well into elementary school I pronounced it as [N] (i.e., a uvular nasal consonant–what you get if you start to say the ng sound and then slide the body of your tongue as far back along your soft palate as you can without cutting off the airflow or gagging).

But nevermind Mr. King’s phonetics, how about his semantics? In the January 27 issue of Entertainment Weekly, I read an excerpt from his latest novel, Cell, and found this gem:

Clay could remember the words from the days when he’d had no reason not to believe his marriage wouldn’t last forever.

OK, let’s see…

reason to believe his marriage wouldn’t last forever

Oh, that’s bad. He thinks his marriage might not last forever.

reason not to believe his marriage wouldn’t last forever

Ah, that’s good! He thinks it will last forever!

no reason not to believe his marriage wouldn’t last forever

Oh, that’s bad. He thinks his marriage won’t last forever. But wait a minute–that was then, which the text implies is different from now, but we already learned a couple of pages ago that he currently doesn’t think his marriage will last forever. Stephen King must have committed an overnegation.

Yittle Sister

Today I took Doug and Adam over to Doug’s friend’s house to play. Doug’s friend had a little sister about Adam’s age. She was a little shy at first, but once she got into playing with the others and started talking, I had a moment of déjà vu. When she wanted to show her dad what she’d made, she said, “Yook!” When she approved of something, she said she yiked it. That brought back memories–memories of Doug and his L’s up until just about a year ago, which faithful readers may recall. (So I guess this would be more of a déjà entendu.)

Every now and then Little Sister would say a perfectly articulated [l], but more often it was a [y]. I wondered if Little Sister shared the rest of Doug’s intriguing /l/ phonology. Like her, Doug had pronounced word-initial /l/ as [y]. But in a consonant cluster, Doug’s /l/ came out as [w]. If only I could find some way to elicit one of those from Little Sister… Aha! I picked up a Clifford doll, and asked, “Hey, Little Sister, who’s this?”

“Cwifford,” she said. Sure enough!

But now for the kicker: Did Little Sister have the same confounding exception to the rule that Doug had had? To wit, in an /sl/ cluster, did the /l/ come out as a [w], as with other clusters, or did it come out as a [y]?

I asked, “Hey, Little Sister, uh, what do you do in your bed at night?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“Oh, I’m just curious. Do you exercise? No? Do you eat ice cream?”

“No, I sweep!” she told me.

So Little Sister’s rule for /l/ in a cluster didn’t have the troublesome exception that Doug’s did. Nice. Doug would have said “syeep.”

At this point, I figured I’d better tell her dad what the heck I was doing. (Come to think of it, it was probably a good thing he was in the room with us when I started asking her what she did in bed. Imagine her sitting at the supper table and telling her mom and dad, “Doug’s dad is weird. He asked me what I did in bed.” Yikes!) Anyway, he was pretty cool about my impromptu research, and when I mentioned that Doug’s /l/ between vowels had come out as [w], he even called Little Sister over, pointed to a picture of Delilah in a kid’s Bible story book and asked her who she was.

“Deyilah,” she said. Oops. Now I remembered the subtler version of Doug’s rule: His /l/ had come out as [y] at the beginning of any stressed syllable (thus, Yaa-Yaa for Laa-Laa the Teletubby), not just the beginning of a word. You needed a word like lollipop (”yawipop”) in order to get that [w] between vowels. Little Sister’s dad was amazingly accommodating! When I told him this latest refinement of the rule, he asked her to say lollipop. She’d had enough, though, and was back to playing with the boys. Oh, well.

L, Yes!

One of Adam’s therapy programs is the last remnant of his speech therapy targeting articulation. Specifically, it’s for him to practice “hiding his tongue” when he forms his alveolar consonants. We do this by having him read aloud a for a few minutes and paying special attention to his T’s, D’s, N’s, S’s, and Z’s, which he tends to say while sticking his tongue between his teeth. In fact, he tends to stick out his tongue when he says his L’s, too, but I’ve been letting that go for two reasons. First, it’s enough of an effort to pay attention to T, D, N, S, and Z. And second, I remember an incident from the first linguistics course I taught. I’m remembering it right now…

We were in the phonetics unit, which I’ve found to be the one that students consistently hate the most, probably because it’s the one that requires the most memorization. I was going over the places of articulation and came to the alveolar ridge, that little ridge behind your top front teeth just before your palate rises up to form the roof of your mouth. (Also referred to as “The Spot” by my speech therapist when I was a kid. She’d put a little rubber band on the tip of my tongue and tell me to put it on The Spot and hold it there for five minutes. She called that exercise the Mother’s Delight. Not fun.)

We went over the alveolar consonants, but when I got to L, some of the students started complaining. Well, started complaining more than they already were, to be precise. They weren’t putting their tongues there to say an L, they told me. “Really?” I asked, and had them say their L’s for me. Sure enough, they had their tongues peeking out between their front teeth, the same place as for the ‘th’ sounds, [θ] and [ð].

“Well, how about that?” I said. “So for about half of you, L is an interdental sound, instead of an alveolar one.” This, of course, raised an important question:

“Which one do we have to put down when it’s on the quiz?”

Since then I’ve found that quite a few Ohioans have interdental L, though it doesn’t sound different enough to attract attention. And, I’ve learned, so do Britney Spears, Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde, and a number of people when they’re making a point of carefully articulating their L’s.

So where do you say your L’s? (And just so we’re clear: “in the kitchen,” “at work,” “in the car,” etc., are not what I have in mind.)

XZIWFUN

Adam rediscovered the bathtub crayons a couple of nights ago, and had me take them down from the high cabinet where he’d caught a glimpse of them. Now who would have stashed those messy things up there? Anyway, after scribbling with them in the tub for a while, and then writing his name, he decided for no particular reason to sound out and write xylophone. This was actually some good generalizing from this therapy. In therapy, he has worked on the sounds of the letters as part of his academic program, and on writing the letters as part of his fine motor program. So I watched as he carefully said the word bit by bit, and wrote, in these colors, X Z I W F U N.

The X he knew, since X is always for either xylophone or X-ray. The Z, I, F, and N were appropriate choices for the sounds he heard, and the U was pretty close. The W was intriguing, though. Adam does indeed pronounce his /l/ as [w] (and also as [n], word-initially), but my understanding about a child’s language acquisition is that even when they can’t produce all the phonemes properly, they can still recognize proper and improper pronunciation. And since Adam has mastered his letter-sounds program and knows the sound L makes, I would have expected Adam to recognize that the letter he needed here was L, even though he himself pronounces it as [w].

Doug was this way, back when he pronounced some of his /l/s as [y]s. We’d have exchanges like this one:

Doug: I’m yucky!
Neal: You’re yucky?
Doug: No, yucky!
Neal: Oh, lucky?
Doug: Yes!

I guess it’s time for me to experiment on my kids again. Tomorrow night I’ll suggest writing a word he hasn’t seen spelled that often, something like lizard or lock, or better yet a nonsense word like laggis, and see if he starts out with an L or an N. Stay tuned!

UPDATE: Last night, I suggested that Adam write ladder. He did, and spelled it LADR.

How L-odramatic

The first time I heard this, is was passingly weird. But now I’ve heard it twice, and I want to know what’s going on. In a scene in the movie Ice Age, a sloth character needs to fake his own death in front of some enemies. He does this by jumping into a saber-toothed tiger’s mouth and shouting, “Help! Help!” Both times when he yells “Help!”, he uses clear /l/ rather than velarized /l/ (a distinction discussed earlier here). It’s very distinct; it’s what makes his cries sound so fake and melodramatic. Why it should do that, I don’t know, other than that it makes his pronunciation sound unnatural, foreign.

More recently, Doug and Adam were watching a Fairly Oddparents video, with an episode called “Crime Wave.” Here, too, someone who was faking a call for help used the clear /l/ to do it. Why the correlation between deliberately corny melodrama and clear /l/? Is the idea just to violate some phonological rule of English to draw attention to the utterance?