Jason McLarty
Assistant Professor
Ph.D. in Linguistics, 2019
University of Oregon
OFFICE: 122 Modern Languages Bldg
EMAIL: jason.alan.mclarty@emory.edu
Office hours: TBA
Jason recently graduated from the University of Oregon, with an interest in sociolinguistics, and sociophonetics in particular. Jason’s work primarily focuses on suprasegmental features of African American Language (AAL), particularly intonation and rhythm. Using modern recordings from older speakers from Raleigh, NC (Dodsworth and Kohn 2012), as well as archival recordings of formerly enslaved African Americans (the Library of Congress) and confederate-era European Americans (Joseph Hall Tapes), Jason looked at how pitch accents and phrasal accents within intonational phrases behave over time.
Jason’s dissertation project, with support of the National Science Foundation (BCS-1627042), used psycholinguistic tasks to investigate how naïve (everyday) listeners perceive prosodic prominence: words that listeners hear as “highlighted by the speaker” and that stand out from other, non-prominent words. In a series of experiments, listeners representing different regional and ethnic backgrounds, as well as different self-reported experiences with AAL, rated prosodic prominence in words in conversational speech from speakers of both African American and Caucasian ethnicities. The results of this study helped uncover the phonetic cues that listeners with different regional and ethnic backgrounds, as well as self-reported experience with AAL use in such perceptions.
Additionally, along with colleagues at the University of Oregon, Jason has studied language variation in the Pacific Northwest, focusing on the language of the Willamette Valley. In one study, they investigated how Oregonians and others in the Pacific Northwest encode past habituality, focusing on the alternation between used to, would, and simple past forms. More recently, using modern recordings, as well as archival recordings from the Dictionary of American Regional English, they have been able to track the progress of sound changes in Oregon, highlighting the fact many relevant changes to the Oregon vowel system occurred in the time period between the two World Wars.
Jason also worked alongside Tyler Kendall and Charlie Farrington in developing the first public corpus of AAL. Specifically, Jason designed the website that houses the corpus, as well as a publicly oriented interface designed to appeal to public users (such as K-12 students, families, and other non-linguists), in addition to researchers, with supporting contextual and educational information about AAL.
Recent Publications:
McLarty, Jason. 2018. African American Language and European American English Intonation Variation over time in the American South. American Speech.Courses Taught
LING 201 / ANT 203 Foundations of Linguistics
LING 285 Introduction to Sociolinguistics
LING 333 Language, Gender, and Sexuality (crosslisted w/ ANT 325 & WGS 333)
LING 340 Language Variation
LING 340 African American Language (crosslisted w/ AAS 385 & ANT 340)