Previous Research
During my graduate training, I focused on sociolinguistics, which I was drawn to because of classroom issues of surrounding dialect diversity. Although I knew I ultimately wanted to study education, I wanted a strong theoretical foundation in language structure and social identity construction first. My research focused on the linguistic patterns of socially marked classes of people, including women, Mexican Americans, and native speakers of Southern American English, and it covered a range of levels of linguistic structure.
Although some of my early work explored discourse patterns, most of my research was in sociophonetics (using social network analysis to explore the relationships between individuals and groups through acoustic data). For example, in my MA thesis, I developed new methods, using acoustic analysis to investigate a phonetic variation that had previously only been studied impresionistically.
For my dissertation, I explored the relationship between the social networks of rural Mexican American speakers and their accommodation to the Northern Cities Shift, a change in the American English vowel system that is typically only found among urban and suburban White speakers in the Inland North. This research is at the intersection of second language acquisition and more general sociolinguistic studies of acoustic variables, and it is part of an ongoing effort among sociolinguists to explore regional variation within the framework of larger minority dialects.
Some of my publications in linguistics include:
Fleming, C., & Ocumpaugh, J. (2002). “What Do You Mean when You Say That?”: Remnant Ideologies in Courtroom Discourse about Rape. Proceedings of LAUD.
Ocumpaugh, J. (2011). Regional Variation and Mexican American English.Voice and Speech Review, 7(1), 188-198.
Ocumpaugh, J. (2010). Regional Variation in Chicano English: Incipient Dialect Formation Among L1 and L2 Speakers in Benton Harbor, Michigan. PhD Dissertation. Michigan State University, East Lansing.
Ocumpaugh, J. L. (2001). The Variable Chapter in the Story of R: An Acoustic Analysis of a Shift in Final and Pre-consonantal Instances of American /r/ Production in Louisburg, North Carolina. MA Thesis, North Carolina State University).
Preston, Dennis, Jaclyn Ocumpaugh et Rebecca Roeder. (2009). L1 and L2 accents : Where the action is. Lengua y migración/Language and Migration 2 : 5–20.