Search

Recent advances in access to spoken-language corpora and development of speech processing tools have made possible the performance of `large-scale' phonetic and sociolinguistic research. This study illustrates the usefulness of such a large-scale approach -- using data from multiple corpora across a range of English dialects, collected and analysed with the SPADE project -- to examine how the pre-consonantal Voicing Effect (longer vowels before voiced than voiceless obstruents, in e.g. \emph{bead} vs \emph{beat}) is realised in spontaneous speech, and varies across dialects and individual speakers. Compared with previous reports of controlled laboratory speech, the Voicing Effect was found to be substantially smaller in spontaneous speech, but still influenced by the expected range of phonetic factors. Dialects of English differed substantially from each other in the size of the Voicing Effect, whilst individual speakers varied little relative to their particular dialect. This study demonstrates the value of large-scale phonetic research as a means of developing our understanding of the structure of speech variability, and illustrates how large-scale studies, such as those carried out within SPADE, can be applied to other questions in phonetic and sociolinguistic research.

The ‘voicing effect’ – the durational difference in vowels preceding voiced and voiceless consonants – is a well-documented phenomenon in English, where it plays a key role in the production and perception of the English final voicing contrast. Despite this supposed importance, little is known as to how robust this effect is in spontaneous connected speech, which is itself subject to a range of linguistic factors. Similarly, little attention has focused on variability in the voicing effect across dialects of English, bar analysis of specific varieties. Our findings show that the voicing of the following consonant exhibits a weaker-than-expected effect in spontaneous speech, interacting with manner, vowel height, speech rate, and word frequency. English dialects appear to demonstrate a continuum of potential voicing effect sizes, where varieties with dialect-specific phonological rules exhibit the most extreme values. The results suggest that the voicing effect in English is both substantially weaker than previously assumed in spontaneous connected speech, and subject to a wide range of dialectal variability.

In this article, we introduce recently released, publicly available resources, which allow users to watch videos of hidden articulators (e.g. the tongue) during the production of various types of sounds found in the world’s languages. The articulation videos on these resources are linked to a clickable International Phonetic Alphabet chart ([International Phonetic Association. 1999. Handbook of the International Phonetic Association: A Guide to the Use of the International Phonetic Alphabet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press]), so that the user can study the articulations of different types of speech sounds systematically. We discuss the utility of these resources for teaching the pronunciation of contrastive sounds in a foreign language that are absent in the learner’s native language.

The cross-linguistic tendency of coda consonants to weaken, vocalize, or be deleted is shown to have a phonetic basis, resulting from gesture reduction, or variation in gesture timing. This study investigates the effects of the timing of the anterior tongue gesture for coda /r/ on acoustics and perceived strength of rhoticity, making use of two sociolects of Central Scotland (working- and middle-class) where coda /r/ is weakening and strengthening, respectively. Previous articulatory analysis revealed a strong tendency for these sociolects to use different coda /r/ tongue configurations-working- and middle-class speakers tend to use tip/front raised and bunched variants, respectively; however, this finding does not explain working-class /r/ weakening. A correlational analysis in the current study showed a robust relationship between anterior lingual gesture timing, F3, and percept of rhoticity. A linear mixed effects regression analysis showed that both speaker social class and linguistic factors (word structure and the checked/unchecked status of the prerhotic vowel) had significant effects on tongue gesture timing and formant values. This study provides further evidence that gesture delay can be a phonetic mechanism for coda rhotic weakening and apparent loss, but social class emerges as the dominant factor driving lingual gesture timing variation.

This paper contributes some new findings towards answering these general theoretical questions about real-time sound change and place. Our study exploits the possibilities offered for a longer-term perspective on real-time change by combining archive recordings from the First World War with those from a real- and apparent-time corpus from the 1970s. We consider three aspects of urban Scots, vowel quality and duration, and the realization of word-initial /l/, using acoustic phonetic measures. The real-time comparisons reveal change in progress in all three features. The direction of the changes is intriguing, since despite the substantial geographical and social changes which have taken place across the UK during especially the second half of the 20th century, and the impact of these in terms of contact-induced changes on urban British accents (e.g. Foulkes and Docherty 1999), it appears that linguistic and social factors to do with the dialect and its location have played a stronger role.

This paper presents the results of an analysis of the realization of word-final /k/ in a sample of read and casual speech by 28 female pupils from a single-sex Glaswegian high school. Girls differed in age, socioeconomic background, and ethnicity. Ejectives were the most usual variant for /k/ in both speech styles, occurring in the speech of every pupil in our sample. Our narrow auditory analysis revealed a continuum of ejective production, from weak to intense stops. Results from multinomial logistic regression show that ejective production is promoted by phonetic, linguistic and interactional factors: ejectives were used more in read speech, when /k/ occurred in the /-ŋk/ cluster (e.g.tank), and when the relevant word was either at the end of a clause or sentence, or in turn-final position. At the same time, significant interactions between style, and position in turn, and the social factors of age and ethnicity, show that the use of ejectives by these girls is subject to a fine degree of sociolinguistic control, alongside interactional factors. Finally, cautious comparison of these data with recordings made in 1997 suggests that these results may also reflect a sound change in progress, given the very substantial real-time increase in ejective realizations of /k/ in Glasgow over the past fourteen years.

For a century, phoneticians have noted a vowel merger in middle-class Scottish English, in the neutralisation of prerhotic checked vowels /ɪ/, /ʌ/, /ɛ/ to a central vowel, e.g. fir, fur, fern [fəɹ], [fəɹ] [fəɹn], or [fɚ], [fɚ], [fɚn]. Working-class speakers often neutralise two of these checked vowels to a low back [ʌ] vowel, fir, fur, both pronounced as [fʌɹ] or as [fʌʕ]. The middle-class merger is often assumed to be an adaptation towards the UK’s socially prestigious R.P. phonological system in which there is a long-standing three-way non-rhotic merger, to [ɜː]. However, we suggest a system-internal cause, that coarticulation with the postvocalic /r/ may play a role in the contemporary Scottish vowel merger. Indeed, strongly rhotic middle-class Scottish speakers have recently been found to produce postvocalic approximant /r/ using a markedly different tongue configuration from working-class Scottish speakers, who also tend to derhoticise /r/. We present the results of an ultrasound tongue imaging investigation into the differing coarticulatory effects of bunched and tongue-front raised /r/ variants on preceding vowels. We compare tongue shapes from two static points during rhotic syllable rimes. Phonetically, it appears that the bunched /r/ used by middle-class speakers exerts a stronger global coarticulatory force over preceding vowel tongue configurations than tongue-front raised /r/ does. This also results in a monophthongal rhotic target for what historically had been three distinct checked vowels. Phonologically, our view is that middle-class speakers of Scottish English have reduced the V+/r/ sequence to one segment; either a rhoticised vowel /ɚ/ or a syllabic rhotic /r/.

This article considers two instances of rapidly accelerating linguistic change in Glaswegian vernacular, th -fronting and l-vocalization , both typically associated with the Cockney dialect of London. Both changes have been underway for some time, but took off during the 1990s. In this article we consider a range of factors that are contributing to the rapid proliferation of these forms in the speech of inner-city Glaswegian adolescents. Our multivariate analysis shows very strong effects for linguistic factors, as well as strong positive correlations with social practices relating to local Glaswegian street style, some links with dialect contact with friends and family living in England, and—perhaps surprisingly—also positive correlations with strong psychological engagement with the London-based TV soap drama EastEnders . Our results suggest that the changes are being propelled by several processes: ongoing transmission and at the same time continuing diffusion through dialect contact; the local social meanings carried by these variants for these speakers; and strong engagement with a favorite TV drama. For this community at least, engaging with a favorite TV drama is an additional accelerating factor in rapid linguistic diffusion.

One of the most famous sound features of Scottish English is the short/long timing alternation of /i u ai/vowels, which depends on the morpho-phonemic environment, and is known of as the Scottish Vowel Length Rule (SVLR). These alternations make the status of vowel quantity in Scottish English (quasi-)phonemic but are also susceptible to change, particularly in situations of intense sustained dialect contact with Anglo-English. Does the SVLR change in Glasgow where dialect contact at the community level is comparably low? The present study sets out to tackle this question, and tests two hypotheses involving (1) external influences due to dialect-contact and (2) internal, prosodically-induced factors of sound change. Durational analyses of /i u a/ were conducted on a corpus of spontaneous Glaswegian speech from the 1970s and 2000s, and four speaker groups were compared, two of middle-aged men, and two of adolescent boys. Our hypothesis that the development of the SVLR over time may be internally constrained and interact with prosody was largely confirmed. We observed weakening effects in its implementation which were localised in phrase-medial unaccented positions in all speaker groups, and in phrase-final positions in the speakers born after the Second World War. But unlike some other varieties of Scottish or Northern English which show weakening of the Rule under a prolonged contact with Anglo-English, dialect contact seems to be having less impact on the durational patterns in Glaswegian vernacular, probably because of the overall reduced potential for a regular, everyday contact in the West given the different demographies.

Foreign accentsyndrome (FAS) refers to a disorder that involves foreign sounding speech, usually following stroke. This paper presents a case study of an English patient allegedly speaking with a Scottish English accent after right-hemisphere stroke. The results of detailed impressionistic and acoustic analyses are reported, based on a direct comparison of the patient’s pre-stroke and post-stroke speech samples. The emphasis is on a comparison of the typical features of Scottish English and phonetic features actually found in the patient’s post-stroke speech. The respective roles of prosodic and segmental features in the post-stroke speech sample are also discussed. Rather untypically, prosodic features seem to be aŒected to a much lesser extent than segmental phonetic features in the patient’s post-stroke speech. They are, therefore, less likely to contribute to the perception of a foreign accent.

Sociophonetic research (e.g. Strand, 1999; Campbell-Kibler, 2007) has shown that speakers’ phonetic variation can affect how others socially evaluate them, and production studies (e.g. Stuart-Smith et al., 2007) have shown that such variation exists in Glasgow along the traditional social class divide. In order to investigate the production/perception link of listeners in Glasgow, we carried out a matched guise experiment designed to test the association between fine phonetic variation and social judgements. Using brand logos as our independent variable (a methodology recently adopted by Kervyn et al., in press), we built a believable set of social practices for our participants to anchor their phonetic evaluations on. Based on the results of four phonetic variables, we found that schema activation led listeners to judge phonetically similar stimuli in markedly different ways. This study adds to the results of the production studies by showing that a significant relationship exists between phonetic variation and social judgements. The results also show that listeners are sensitive to phonetic variation in Glasgow, and crucially, that they are easily able to categorise this variation according to associated conceptions of local social identities.

The sociolinguistic modelling of phonological variation and change is almost exclusively based on auditory and acoustic analyses of speech. One phenomenon which has proved elusive when considered in these ways is the variation in postvocalic /r/ in Scottish English. This study therefore shifts to speech production: we present a socioarticulatory study of variation of postvocalic /r/ in CVr words, using a socially-stratified ultrasound tongue imaging corpus of speech collected in eastern central Scotland in 2008. Our results show social stratification of /r/ at the articulatory level, with middle-class speakers using bunched articulations, while working-class speakers use greater proportions of tongue-tip and tongue-front raised variants. Unlike articulatory variation of /r/ in American English, the articulatory variants in our Scottish English corpus are both auditorily distinct from one another, and correlate with strong and weak ends of an auditory rhotic continuum, which also shows clear social stratification.

This paper presents an analysis of language variation and change in a socially stratified corpus of Glaswegian collected in 1997. Eight consonantal variables in read and spontaneous speech from 32 speakers were analysed separately and then together using multivariate analysis. Our results show that middle-class speakers, with weaker network ties and more opportunities for mobility and contact with English English speakers, are maintaining traditional Scottish features. Working-class adolescents, with more limited mobility and belonging to close-knit networks, are changing their vernacular by using 'non-local' features such as TH-fronting and reducing expected Scottish features such as postvocalic /r/. We argue that local context is the key to understanding the findings. Mobility and network structures are involved, but must be taken in conjunction with the recent history of structural changes to Glasgow and the resulting construction of local class-based language ideologies which continue to be relevant in the city today.

While voice onset time (VOT) is known to be sensitive to a range of phonetic and linguistic factors, much less is known about VOT in spontaneous speech, since most studies consider stops in single words, in sentences, and/or in read speech. Scottish English is typically said to show less aspirated voiceless stops than other varieties of English, but there is also variation, ranging from unaspirated stops in vernacular speakers to more aspirated stops in Scottish Standard English; change in the vernacular has also been suggested. This paper presents results from a study which used a fast, semi-automated procedure for analyzing positive VOT, and applied it to stressed syllable-initial stops from a real- and apparent-time corpus of naturally-occurring spontaneous Glaswegian vernacular speech. We confirm significant effects on VOT for place of articulation and local speaking rate, and trends for vowel height and lexical frequency. With respect to time, our results are not consistent with previous work reporting generally shorter VOT in elderly speakers, since our results from models which control for local speech rate show lengthening over real-time in the elderly speakers in our sample. Overall, our findings suggest that VOT in both voiceless and voiced stops is lengthening over the course of the twentieth century in this variety of Scottish English. They also support observations from other studies, both from Scotland and beyond, indicating that gradient shifts along the VOT continuum reflect subtle sociolinguistic control.

Johnston (1997) suggests that, if defined in terms of phonology, Scots as a traditional dialect in Britain has a “rosy future”. Glaswegian is known to continue Scots L‑vocalization in words such as ball and all. L‑vocalization of a different type, similar to that found in Cockney, is one feature which has been observed to be diffusing rapidly across accents of English. This paper considers the evidence for these two distinct processes of L‑vocalization in Glaswegian, drawing on empirical evidence from two corpora of Glaswegian collected in the early 1980s and late 1990s. The results from the later corpus confirm the vigorous maintenance of the Scots l‑vocalization, but at the same time provide clear indications of the incorporation of innovative L‑vocalization. Our findings confirm that at the phonological level at least, the Urban Scots of Glaswegian youngsters is both conservative and innovative.

We present some methodological guidelines for analyzing linguistic dissimilarity matrices, in particular graph-theoretic procedures and multivariate methods. We discuss the usefulness and limitations of phonological data besides lexical data as the basis of linguistic classification from data analysis procedures.

Within the framework of constructing learning, this paper explores the feelings of bilingual children towards developing two languages, two literacies and belonging to two communities in the environment of the education system, which in England is insensitive towards bilingual learners in its implementation of a monolingual and monoliterate curriculum. This paper presents the approaches and procedures employed to investigate young bilingual children's constructs of their own identity and about being bilingual and becoming biliterate. Importantly, these constructs are expbred through both the children's languages which has not been done in previous studies. Our findings show that bilingual children express their constructs of bilingualism, literacy and identity differently in both languages. Throughout the paper, we indicate the educational implications of this study for the policy and practice of the monolingual and monoliterate curriculum in England for bilingual children's identities languages ...

Increasing attention is being paid in sociolinguistics to how fine phonetic variation is exploited by speakers to construct and index social identity (Hay and Drager 2007). To date, most sociophonetic work on consonants has made use of acoustic analysis to reveal unexpectedly subtle variation which is nonetheless socially indexical (e.g. Docherty and Foulkes 1999). However, some aspects of speech production are not readily recoverable even with a fine-grained acoustic analysis. New articulatory analysis techniques, such as ultrasound tongue imaging (UTI), allow researchers to push the boundaries further, identifying seemingly covert aspects of speech articulation which pattern with indexical factors with remarkable consistency. One such case is postvocalic /r/ variation in Central Scotland.

Sociophonetic variation presents us with challenges and opportunities. This paper focuses on an area of phonetic variation which is particularly rich and informative about the social exploitation of the complexities of the acoustics-articulatory relationship – namely fine-grained variation and change in Scottish English coda /r/. Scottish English is typically thought to be 'rhotic' (e.g. Wells 1982), such that postvocalic /r/ in words such as car, card, and better are realized with some kind of articulated rhotic consonant (approximant, tap, and exceptionally a trill). This paper presents historical and more recent sociophonetic data from the Central Belt of Scotland (from Edinburgh to Glasgow), which show auditory/impressionistic, acoustic, and articulatory evidence of derhoticisation (e.g. Stuart-Smith 2003; Stuart-Smith et al 2007; Lawson et al 2011a; Lawson et al 2011). Derhoticisation is especially evident in working-class speakers, whilst middle-class speakers are developing auditorily 'stronger' rhotics and merging vowels before /r/. We consider the geographical and social distribution of the rhotic-derhotic continuum in these varieties and the linguistic and sociolinguistic factors involved, and the evidence to date that exists from speech perception and social evaluation of speech. We conclude by considering how sociophonological detail and abstraction are encoded in mental representations (cf e.g. Johnson 2006).

This chapter summarises the findings from over a decade of research on the possible influence of the broadcast media on speech which has been carried out in Scotland’s largest city, Glasgow. Our focus on the media, and particularly television, as a factor (or bundle of factors) in language change, arose coincidentally from an initial variationist study into phonological variation and change in Glaswegian for the Urban Voices volume (Foulkes and Docherty 1999). The format of the Urban Voices survey required us to analyse the same ’London’ English consonant variables known to be spreading rapidly across England (e.g. Trudgill 1988) in this ‘traditional’ Scottish dialect (e.g. Wells 1982). Glaswegian vernacular continues a variety of West Central Broad Scots, with dialect mixing and levelling towards (Scottish) Standard English (Macafee 1983). It is substantially different from English English accents, phonologically and phonetically (Wells 1982; Stuart-Smith 2004). It also has well-established local non-standard variation deriving from Broad Scots. Our analysis contained some surprising discoveries, concentrated in the speech of working-class adolescents: TH-fronting, e.g. [f]ink as well as local [h]ink, DH-fronting, bro[v]er beside bro[r]er, and L-vocalisation to high back (un)rounded vowels in e.g. fill, despite the pharyngealised quality of Glasgow /l/, as more than sporadic in the speech of working-class adolescents (Stuart-Smith 1999; cf. Macafee 1983).

This paper aims to describe pre-aspirated and post-aspirated stops in an endangered language, Scottish Gaelic. Our small-scale study investigates several acoustic parameters of Scottish Gaelic stop consonants designed to measure the duration and noisiness of aspiration of the stop in its immediate phonetic context. Our study expands on previous phonetic descriptions of phonemic (pre-)aspiration in three ways: firstly, we provide a more complete durational description of Scottish Gaelic than previous work in the literature; secondly, we apply a new measure, band-pass filtered zero crossing rate (Gordeeva & Scobbie 2010), in order to examine the noisiness of aspiration in addition to durational characteristics. The results from this measure are presented in tandem with durational results in order to assess its usefulness for future research. Thirdly, we consider the possibility of change in the Scottish Gaelic stop system by examining data from older and younger speakers. Results suggest that band-pass filtered zero crossing rate is a useful tool and should be considered in future research on aspiration. Also, durational and zero crossing results indicate that younger speakers have shorter and less noisy pre-aspiration than older speakers. We discuss these results as a possible sound change in progress.

A basic assumption of phonological reconstruction is that plausible processes of change connect reconstructed sounds with the reflexes on which they are based. It is not clear, however, how this plausibility is assessed. The decisions seem to be made on the basis of intuitive feelings about how languages change, from observations of language change and general phonetics. Problems arise when two competing explanations for a reconstructed sound change are offered: each may be as plausible as the other, and yet there must, in theory, be one explanation which is nearer the "truth". A more systematic analysis of the phonetics of sounds and their diachronic behaviour is needed if we are to offer the most phonetically plausible explanations. The development of the PIE voiced aspirates in Italic is a typical case of a reconstructed sound change whose mechanics are obscure and much debated. The development is evaluated here using two complementary approaches: an examination of the phonetic characteristics of voiced aspirates (breathy voiced stops) within the framework of Ohala's theory of sound change, and a comparison of predictions thus made with attested parallel developments. On this basis, a new explanation is proposed.

This study aimed to determine the relative processing cost associated with comprehension of an unfamiliar native accent under adverse listening conditions. Two sentence verification experiments were conducted in which listeners heard sentences at various signal-to-noise ratios. In Experiment 1, these sentences were spoken in a familiar or an unfamiliar native accent or in two familiar native accents. In Experiment 2, they were spoken in a familiar or unfamiliar native accent or in a nonnative accent. The results indicated that the differences between the native accents influenced the speed of language processing under adverse listening conditions and that this processing speed was modulated by the relative familiarity of the listener with the native accent. Furthermore, the results showed that the processing cost associated with the nonnative accent was larger than for the unfamiliar native accent.