Phonetic studies of Hawaiian speakers and learners

New York University, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

The revitalization of Modern Hawaiian since the 1970s-80s has led to a thriving community of Hawaiian speakers today, with a robust system of pre-K-12 Hawaiian-medium education, as well as university and teacher training programs in the Hawaiian language. Despite the critical mass of speakers and availability of historical language and speech materials, phonetic research on Hawaiian is underrepresented. This project examines the sound system of the speech of three groups of speakers: (1) the growing community of Modern Hawaiian speakers in Hilo, (2) adult students who are intermediate-level learners of Modern Hawaiian in Hilo, and (3) pre-revitalization Hawaiian elders interviewed in the 1970s-80s on the radio program Ka Leo Hawai'i (KLH). To establish the phonetic properties of the language being acquired by children and adult learners, the team first examines the acoustic properties of proficient adult speakers of Hawaiian. They then turn to assessing adult language learners, with an aim toward identifying sounds which may be more challenging for this group. This project contributes to the phonetic documentation of the Hawaiian language, including work with language teachers and other community members to create pedagogical materials. The project also contributes to ongoing work in the development of automatic speech recognition (ASR) for Hawaiian. The advancement of ASR helps to alleviate the shortage of Hawaiian transcribers, who play a critical role in US educational, government, and entertainment contexts. The current research focuses on the realization and acquisition of Hawaiian sounds including oral and glottal stops in multiple prosodic positions, the vowel length distinction in Hawaiian, and the [w~v] variants of /v/. Since previous research on oral and glottal stops examining the KLH interviews indicated that their realization affected by prosodic considerations, the elicitation materials in this study manipulate where the stops occur with respect to (lexical) word position, prosodic word position, and syllabic stress. Studying the role of prosodic and word-internal metrical structure in conditioning the phonetic realization of Hawaiian sounds contributes to a growing literature regarding how multiple levels of phonological structure interface with phonetic implementation. These studies also allow for an examination of whether second language learners are sensitive to these fine-grained phonetic properties. In addition to the production studies, a perception study investigates what voice quality information is used in perceiving word-initial glottal stops. A final component of this research is a continued study of the speech of the KLH speakers from their recorded interviews, focusing on the implementation of the vowel length distinction in Hawaiian, and on what factors condition variation in the pronunciation of [w~v] variants of /v/. The outcome of these studies contributes to the design of instructional materials and videos regarding the acquisition of sounds that may present a challenge for adult learners of Hawaiian. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.