Marianna Di Paolo is currently Associate Professor at the University of Utah where she has served as Director of the Linguistics Program (1993-1999) and then as the first Chair of the Department of Linguistics (1999-2005). Her primary research interest has been variation and change in the English of the Intermountain West with a concentration on on-going phonetic and phonological changes in the vowels of this region. Malcah Yaeger-Dror is currently a research scientist at the University of Arizona. Her primary research interests include the analysis of disagreement strategies keynoting prosodic variation and the analysis of the cognitive underpinnings which can reveal whether a given 'change' produced by a speaker is from 'above' or 'below' the speaker's 'level of awareness'.

• Contents  1. Introduction   2. Field Methods: gathering data, creating a corpus, and reporting your work  3. Making a Field Recording  4. Transcription  5. Issues in Using Legacy Data  6. Analyzing Stops  7. Analyzing Liquids  8. Analyzing Vowels  9. More on Vowels: Plotting and Normalization  10. Analyzing Prosody: Best Practices for the Analysis of Prosody  11. Acoustical Analysis of Voice Quality for Sociophonetic Purposes  12. Experimental Speech Perception and Perceptual Dialectology  13. Working with Children  14. Ascertaining Word Classes  15. Checking for Reliability  16. Statistical Analysis  References

'This book is a rich source of information on methodologies of sociophontic analysis, with information ranging from the basic of data collection to the most advanced computational techniques. The editors have done a remarkable job... This gives a new perspective to phonetics analysis for both fresh researchers and veterans in the field.'LINGUIST List