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Introduction: The rapid online expansion of social media can decrease social isolation for both caregivers and persons with dementia (PWD) through the digital communities they create. Background: PWD and their caregivers are increasingly turning to social media to express their own concerns and offer advice to each other. Material analyzed: Multimodal methods were used to analyze three online sites – two caregiver sites and one site for PWD. The sites are StoryCall, a video archive recorded by South Carolina caregivers about caring for US veterans with dementia; Molly and Joey, a video series of Joey’s interactions with his mother Molly, who had Lewy body dementia; and Dementia Diaries, oral diaries transcribed by volunteers. Results: The topics discussed online by people who wish to advise caregivers often differ from the issues and topics that most concern or interest caregivers. Persons with dementia openly shared that they still wished to live as well as possible and wanted to be seen as real people. Implications and conclusions: Through social media, PWD remind themselves and others that they are more than their condition; similarly, caregivers of PWD educate themselves and others through sharing experiences and asking questions.

Māori, the threatened language of the indigenous people of New Zealand, has been undergoing revitalisation since the 1970s. The MAONZE project (Māori and New Zealand English) has studied sound change in Māori by comparing the speech of historical elders, present-day elders and young speakers. Here we analyse the read speech from nine present-day elders and twelve young speakers and compare it with the results from our previous analysis of their conversational material to investigate whether style shift occurs in more careful Māori speech. Pronunciation change was restricted to the backing of long /u:/, a sound whose fronting had been stigmatised and of which older female speakers seemed to be particularly aware. We conclude that, although there is some indication of style-shift in the read material, ‘first wave’ (Eckert 2012) sociolinguistic methodology is not appropriate for Māori speakers whose notion of class and prestige differ from that of previously articulated sociolinguistic norms.

In this paper we draw from variationist analysis and ethnographic and sociopragmatic approaches to examine conversations with Maureen Littlejohn who moved from mild into moderate Alzheimer's disease over the six years of the study. As dementia increases, people often find it difficult to use pragmatic particles such as well, so or you know. We explore how Ms Littlejohn used UH, often dismissed by researchers as only marking hesitations, as a pragmatic particle in conversations with students and with the first author. In our analysis we adopt categories used by Gonzalez (2004) in her exploration of the pragmatic force of markers such as well, so, then, and anyway in both English and Catalan. We demonstrate that, even in her last conversations, Ms Littlejohn was able to use UH in a variety of pragmatically meaningful ways to express many of the categories identified by Gonzalez.

The question addressed by Preventing Alzheimer’s and other Dementias Now is indicated in the Preface: “Can an evidence-based, non-invasive, non-pharmacological protocol encompassing body, environme...

In ordinary conversations, we don’t always pay much attention to “little words” like so or well or uh. Nevertheless, they play key roles in our interactions. As discourse markers, they signal boundaries between topics, they let us know new ones are starting, or they signal a slow-down in our exchange. They suggest how and why one of us said something. These are their pragmatic functions. As persons with dementia have increased problems with expressing themselves, they often use these little words more frequently, sometimes to hold their turn or keep their place in the conversations, and other times, to suggest additional meanings to us. Paying attention to but or so, for example, can let us infer what the person is trying to say, and we can keep talk flowing.

The stories told by people with dementia are often fragmented and repeated many times. This leads people to discount their value and ignore what they can reveal about the tellers. This paper focuse...

Although there have been many studies of New Zealand English (NZE) vowels, little has been written about the nurse vowel /ɜ:/. This study uses data from three groups of Māori speakers of NZE born b...

This article analyses mismatched and unexpected responses to questions in a survey administered to thirteen people with traumatic brain injury or their relatives. Rather than giving simple one word or yes-no answers, the respondents provided unexpected narrative answers that went beyond the scope of the survey questions. The analysis identifies the types of narratives used by the respondents and highlights the ways in which they expressed their concerns about their life post-injury. It ends with a plea for more information to be provided to patients and their relatives about the ‘new normal’ life after a traumatic brain injury.

An extreme use of a voice feature with a lowered rough sound called vocal fry or creaky voice has become increasingly recognised in American, British and New Zealand English speaking young women. It is not regarded as an involuntary voice disorder, but rather as a volitional strategy. Intermittent vocal fry is recognised as a common voice feature, particularly at the end of a sentence. It occurs at the lowest range of a speaker's F0 (pitch). We present evidence that vocal fry use is increasing in young New Zealand women. This article is to highlight the new phenomenon of extreme and sustained vocal fry as a vocal style, which is the first voice feature to have come to the attention of the general public through the news media.

This article investigates sound change in the vowels of Māori, the indigenous language of New Zealand. It examines the relationship between sound changes in Māori and in New Zealand English, the more dominant language, with which Māori has been in close contact for nearly 200 years. We report on the analysis of three adult speaker groups whose birth dates span 100 years. All speakers were bilingual in Māori and New Zealand English. In total the speech of 31 men and 31 women was investigated. Analysis was done on the first and second formant values, extracted from the vowel targets. There has been considerable movement in the Māori vowel space. We find that the sound change in the Māori monophthongs can be directly attributed to the impact of New Zealand English, however the situation for the diphthongs is not so clear cut. There is some evidence that both New Zealand English monophthongs and diphthongs are impacting on the Māori diphthongs, but so too are the Māori monophthongs. We conclude that although New Zealand English has had a strong influence on Māori, there is very strong evidence that new generations of speakers of Māori are acquiring a phonemic system with its own internal parameters and consistencies.

Malaysian English (MalE) is widely used in Malaysia by different ethnic groups. From the perspective of ethnolects, MalE can be divided into the subvarieties of Malay-influenced (MME), Chinese-influenced (ChME) and Indian-influenced (IME) MalE. This paper places MalE within its geographical and linguistic context and then describes the consonantal features which are shared and not shared across MME, ChME and IME. The study involved 15 undergraduates, aged from 19 to 22 years old. There were five participants in each of the three ethnicities, Chinese, Malay and Indian. The participants read a list of words containing all the English consonant phonemes. The data were transcribed and analyzed descriptively. The results indicate that Malaysians maintain a combination of features in their pronunciation, some of which mark them out as distinctively ‘Malaysian’, and others which reveal their ethnic origins as Chinese, Malay or Indian. One cannot therefore assume that all Malaysians sound alike when they speak En...

The Māori tense/aspect marker ka has historically two allomorphs: one, /ka:/, which is used when the rest of the verb phrase consists of only two morae, and the other, /ka/, for longer phrases. Recordings of native speakers born toward the end of the nineteenth century show that this distribution was at that time observed with a high degree of consistency. However, more recent speaker groups show variable behavior in this respect, with modern younger speakers tending to show abandonment of the allomorphy in favor of consistent use of the short form. This shift is attributable both to a proportional increase in the use of longer phrases over the same period and to the decreasing use of Māori generally, so that opportunities to acquire the inherited rule have diminished considerably.

The critical shortage of culturally and linguistically appropriate assessment tools has been an ongoing issue highlighted by Malaysian speech-language pathologists (SLPs). The present study was designed to provide insight into Malaysian SLPs' perspectives on the current use of articulation and phonology assessments in the country. It reports the results of a survey of 38 Malaysian SLPs in term of the types of articulation and phonological assessments currently used; SLPs' perceptions about the adequacy and accuracy of current articulation and phonological assessment in meeting clinical needs; the experiences of SLPs in using current articulation and phonological assessments; as well as the need for further research in the areas of articulation and phonology. The findings indicate that informal articulation or phonological assessments were widely used. Only a minority of the respondents used standardized articulation or phonological assessments. The majority of the respondents felt that the lack of...

This article examines the relationship between the frontness of /u/ and the aspiration of /t/ in both Māori and New Zealand English (NZE). In both languages, these processes can be observed since the earliest recordings dating from the latter part of the nineteenth century. We report analyses of these developments for three groups of male speakers of Māori spanning the twentieth century. We compare the Māori analyses with analyses of related features of the speakers' English and of the English of monolingual contemporaries. The occurrence of these processes in Māori cannot be seen simply as interference from NZE as the Māori-speaking population became increasingly bilingual. We conclude that it was the arrival of English with its contrast between aspirated and unaspirated plosives, rather than direct borrowing, that was the trigger for the fronting of the hitherto stable back Māori /u/ vowel together with increased aspiration of /t/ before both /i/ and /u/.

Malaysian English (MalE) has gained recognition as one of the New Englishes and is now developing into a mature variety with its own pronunciation. This paper represents the first attempt at an auditory quantitative description of MalE spoken by a group of ten Malaysian Chinese adults. It is appropriate to consider the English of Chinese Malaysians as a significant variety of MalE because Chinese form the second largest ethnic group in Malaysia. Historically, a group of ethnic Chinese in Malaysia was the numerically dominant urban group who attended English-medium schools and used English as their dominant language. Today, many Chinese in Malaysia speak English as a first language. The present study investigates features of the consonant and vowel production of these adults. The consonant and vowel inventories are considered as well as phonological features. Where relevant, the MalE results are compared with other varieties of English. The findings of this study are important for linguists, speech...

This discussion examines how speaker pauses, both filled and silent, are keyed to functions within a conversation and to functions within narration. In Alzheimer's discourse, pause-fillers can be both placeholders and hesitation markers; they may be ohs and ums or longer formulaic phrases. Extracts from the speech of 4 older women from the United States and from New Zealand are reviewed for changes in syntactic complexity, for retention of story components, and for pauses. The extracts illustrate these functions for silent pauses: as word-finding; as planning at word, phrase, and narrative component levels; and as pragmatic compensation as other interactional and narrative skills decrease.

Speech-language pathologists focus on the details of their clients' communication difficulties. This is essential in order to carry out therapy appropriately. They often have less time to focus on the state of the language variety, for example Australian English or New Zealand English, in which they are doing therapy. Language variety becomes salient when a speech-language pathologist moves countries and adjustments must be made to his/her habitual clinical expectations. However the local variety can become no more than “background noise” if the clinician continues to practise within a local area. It is essential to examine the details of the local variety of our language in order to keep our perceptions honed and our connections current. This paper will reflect on connections between New Zealand and Australian varieties of English—their shared origins, similarities and differences and changes in progress. Relevance to speech-language pathologists will be emphasized. A sound file is provided (online at ww...

Māori and English have been in increasing contact within New Zealand for over 200 years. The impact of each language on the other in vocabulary, which has been borrowed in both directions, is clear. More subtle is the mutual influence in the area of pronunciation. The MAONZE project has been investigating changes in the pronunciation of Māori and of the English of speakers of Māori, using recordings of seven kaumātua born in the 19th century who were interviewed by the Mobile Unit of Radio New Zealand in the 1940s (referred to in the text as the TK group), of ten kaumātua alive today (K), and of ten younger speakers (T). This paper describes our methodology and reports the results of the investigation of the long and short vowels of Māori as well as of some diphthongs. These were all studied acoustically, that is to say, using computers to analyse the sound waves characteristic of each sound. For each vowel and diphthong, and for each speaker, we attempted to analyse thirty examples, though some sounds are relatively rare, such as /ī/ and /ao/, so that this target could not always be achieved. The analysis did indeed find that there had been shifts in the pronunciation of these sounds over the three generations of speakers in the study. Except for the distinction between /a/ and /ā/, the length and qualitative difference between the historical long and short vowels is decreasing. Most striking is the shift in /u/ and /ū/ to a much more forward position in the mouth, a change which parallels movement in English. The five diphthongs studied were /au, ou, ao, ai, ae/, all of which are clearly distinct in the speech of the TK and K groups, but which are tending to merge to three in the younger group, who no longer distinguish tae and tai or hau and hou so clearly. Within the T group, we distinguished between those who had been speaking Māori since birth (R1), and those who had acquired good Māori at school or later (R2). It turned out that in all the changes taking place, the R2-T group is leading the way, and is thus probably the direction the language will take into the future, particularly as the majority of younger speakers of Māori these days belong to this category.

The Maori language is the language of the indigenous people of New Zealand. Today, not all Maori speak the Maori language, and many Maori as well as non-Maori speak Maori English, the fastest growing of the main varieties of New Zealand English. This paper provides a background to the linguistic situation of the Maori populace in New Zealand, including the current revitalization of the Maori language and the increasing use of Maori English. Speech-language therapists working with Maori clients now see children who are monolingual speakers of standard New Zealand English or monolingual speakers of Maori English, young children who are being raised as bilingual speakers of Maori and English, and older people who are relatively fluent in Maori.

Māori is the language of the indigenous people of New Zealand. Traditionally the Māori plosive consonants are regarded as unaspirated, in contrast to English voiceless plosives which are strongly aspirated in initial position. This paper traces the increase in aspiration in Māori plosives over time by analysing the Māori and English plosive consonants of three speakers born over a span of nearly 100 years. It shows that both the number of aspirated plosives and the degree of aspiration (measured by VOT) have increased from the oldest speaker (born in 1885) to the youngest speaker (born in 1972) in both languages. There may be some language internal factors at work, but influence from English is a likely cause for this change. The youngest speaker was born before the Māori language revitalization programme was established. The results provide a snapshot of the pronunciation of Māori stops before the development of the kōhanga reo revitalization movement (Māori language nests) in 1982.

This preliminary study aimed to measure changes in vocal function across a solo vocal performance task. Five participants, all trained singers, were required to complete a 10-min standard vocal warm-up, sing from a familiar repertoire for 40 min, and rest their voices for 10 min. Vocal function data were collected at 10-min intervals throughout the experimental session. Acoustic perturbation, sound pressure level and semitone pitch indices were employed as objective vocal function measures. A visual analogue scale and checklist of vocal fatigue symptoms were employed as self-report measures. Results revealed individual variation in vocal endurance, suggesting the importance of vocal history and repertoire factors in predisposing the onset of fatigue. Sound pressure level and pitch indices appeared more useful than perturbation indices in reflecting meaningful trends in vocal change.

Measures of speaking rate provide an index of speech timing control. The present study sought to evaluate speech timing control in two varieties of English, American English (AE), and New Zealand English (NZE). Measures of speaking rate were calculated for 40 adult AE speakers which were then compared to a group of 40 adult NZE speakers. Results of the analysis identified significantly faster speaking rate and articulation rate among the NZE speakers compared to AE speakers. Vowel changes occurring in both varieties of English over the past decades, as well as contrasting rhythmic properties, are proposed to account for the rate differences. Because temporal differences can be a component of disordered speech and are a major component in certain motor speech disorders and disorders of fluency, normative speaking rate data are often utilized by speech–language pathologists. The present results, viewed from a clinical standpoint, would suggest that the particular variety of English spoken by a client is an important variable when addressing disorders of speech timing.

Approximately 20 percent of the original settlers to New Zealand came from Scotland, and Scottish influence is still visible around New Zealand and in New Zealand English (NZE) vocabulary. But the phonological systems of NZE and Scottish English are so different that it is difficult to see any residual influence of the early Scottish settlers in New Zealand pronunciation today. In this study, the authors use a database of historical recordings held in the Origins of New Zealand English project to track the possible influence of the early Scottish settlers on modern NZE phonology. They show that although the centralized vowel in the lexical set of KIT is not a legacy from the early Scottish settlers, Scottish English nevertheless had a discernible influence as NZE developed out of the initial dialect-contact situation in which the first European settlers found themselves.

Purpose This study investigated consonant cluster acquisition in Chinese-influenced Malaysian English (ChME)-speaking children. Method This cross-sectional study involved 262 typically developing ChME-speaking children (138 girls, 124 boys) ages 3 to 7 years old. A single-word picture-naming task, which contained 66 words and targeted 32 syllable-initial (SI) and 14 syllable-final (SF) consonant clusters, was administered. Results Older children produced more correct productions than younger children, and there was no sex effect for consonant cluster production. SF consonant clusters were more accurate than SI consonant clusters among the younger children. The overall sequence of SI consonant cluster accuracy based on cluster categories from most to least accurate was /s/ + C, C + /w/, C + /j/, C + /l/, and C + /r/, whereas for SF consonant clusters, the order was C + stop, C + /s/, nasal + C, and /l/ + C. Two-element clusters consistently had higher accuracy in comparison to three-element clusters across the age groups. The overall consonant cluster accuracy of the present study showed similar patterns to those found in previous studies of Standard English. Conclusion The findings of the study will be useful in the assessment of consonant cluster production of ChME-speaking children.

Since 1983, the Canterbury NEAR/SQUARE study has tracked the on-going merger of NEAR and SQUARE in New Zealand English. This paper reports on four repetitions of the study. The results indicate that the two diphthongs are falling together on a close realization which is labelled as NEAR. Factors affecting the process of the merger, such as sex and social class of the speakers, and degree of stress on the test words are discussed, as are the difficulties of carrying out a long-term study of a sound change in progress.