Changes in Received Pronunciation: Diachronic Case Studies

This paper sets out to investigate changes and individual irregularities in the Received Pronunciation of a number of individuals over time and to compare them with the changes noted in contemporary RP in the literature. The aim of the study is to ascertain whether accent change affects individuals during their lifetimes or is only brought about by new generations of speakers accepting different pronunciations as the norm and effectively speaking with a different accent to older generations within their social circle. The variations/changes looked for were: CLOTH transfer, CURE lowering, GOAT allophony, R-sandhi, and T-voicing. The procedure of the study was to identify the presence or absence of these features in the speech of certain individuals in recordings made over a period of at least 35 years. The individuals studied were: Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, Baroness Thatcher, Sir David Attenborough and David Dimbleby. The results of these comparisons suggest that individual speakers are not greatly affected by changes in pronunciation taking place around them and generally stay with the preferred pronunciation of their youth. There are, however, cases where a general uncertainty amongst speakers of the accent, here found in CURE lowering, does influence the speech of individuals over time

Directions for the future of technology in pronunciation research and teaching

This paper reports on the role of technology in state-of-the-art pronunciation research and instruction, and makes concrete suggestions for future developments. The point of departure for this contribution is that the goal of second language (L2) pronunciation research and teaching should be enhanced comprehensibility and intelligibility as opposed to native-likeness. Three main areas are covered here. We begin with a presentation of advanced uses of pronunciation technology in research with a special focus on the expertise required to carry out even small-scale investigations. Next, we discuss the nature of data in pronunciation research, pointing to ways in which future work can build on advances in corpus research and crowdsourcing. Finally, we consider how these insights pave the way for researchers and developers working to create research-informed, computer-assisted pronunciation teaching resources. We conclude with predictions for future developments

Ejectives in Scottish English: a social perspective

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

Second language comprehensibility revisited: investigating the effects of learner background

The current study investigated first language (L1) effects on listener judgment of comprehensibility and accentedness in second language (L2) speech. The participants were 45 university-level adult speakers of English from three L1 backgrounds (Chinese, Hindi, Farsi), performing a picture narrative task. Ten native English listeners used continuous sliding scales to evaluate the speakers’ audio recordings for comprehensibility, accentedness, as well as 10 linguistic variables drawn from the domains of pronunciation, fluency, lexis, grammar, and discourse. While comprehensibility was associated with several linguistic variables (segmentals, prosody, fluency, lexis, grammar), accentedness was primarily linked to pronunciation (segmentals, word stress, intonation). The relative strength of these associations also varied as a function of the speakers’ L1, especially for comprehensibility, with Chinese speakers influenced chiefly by pronunciation variables (segmental errors), Hindi speakers by lexicogrammar variables, and Farsi speakers showing no strong association with any linguistic variable. Results overall suggest that speakers’ L1 plays an important role in listener judgments of L2 comprehensibility and that instructors aiming to promote L2 speakers’ communicative success may need to expand their teaching targets beyond segmentals to include prosody-, fluency-, and lexicogrammar-based targets

On the Tail of the Scottish Vowel Length Rule in Glasgow

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

Cappadocian in the social media era

Until very recently, Cappadocian Greek seemed to have disappeared without a trace. Linguists and dialectologists even believed it had become extinct altogether. However, one Cappadocian variety, Mišótika, is still spoken in some villages and towns in the decentralized administrations of Macedonia and Thrace, Epirus and Western Macedonia, and Thessaly and Central Greece. The dialect is undergoing attrition under the growing pressure of Standard Modern Greek and its regional varieties and is actually being re-Hellenized. Even the oldest speakers make free use of Greek instead of Misiótika words and expressions and attrition is noticeable in at the phonological, morphological and syntactic levels. As a result, there are now many semi- or even would-be speakers whose speech is located somewhere on a continuum from Mišótika with Standard or Regional Modern Greek elements in it to Standard or Regional Modern Greek with Mišótika elements in it - in both cases mostly words and phrases. Over the past ten years, we have witnessed a growing interest in Mišótika as a marker of (Mišótika) Cappadocian identity. Speakers feel more confident to speak their language in public, for instance at the annual Gavoustima, where theatrical plays in Mišótika are now regularly performed by the syllogos of Néo Agionéri (to the amusement and also to bewilderment of the audience). Remarkably and very fortunately, Mišótika is now also used in the Social Media. I will concentrate here on Facebook, especially on the page called Έναρξη Διδασκαλίας Εκµάθησης Μυστιώτικου Ιδιώµατος ( group 470281169768316 on FB). The title is identical with the subtitle of Thomas Fates’ book Χ͜ιογός α ας χαρίσ̌’, which is some sort of “Teach Yourself Mišótika” and in which, interestingly, a special orthography for Mišótika has been developed. I will discuss the kind of information found on the FB page: questions, questionnaires, explanations of words and short phrases, folktales and other short stories, audio & video clips etc. Particular attention will be paid to the problems of using the Greek alphabet to write Mišótika in relation to the ongoing phonological attrition and also to the insecurity when it comes to interpretation linguistic phenomena in Mišótika

An exploration of the rhythm of Malay

In recent years there has been a surge of interest in speech rhythm. However we still lack a clear understanding of the nature of rhythm and rhythmic differences across languages. Various metrics have been proposed as means for measuring rhythm on the phonetic level and making typological comparisons between languages (Ramus et al, 1999; Grabe & Low, 2002; Dellwo, 2006) but the debate is ongoing on the extent to which these metrics capture the rhythmic basis of speech (Arvaniti, 2009; Fletcher, in press). Furthermore, cross linguistic studies of rhythm have covered a relatively small number of languages and research on previously unclassified languages is necessary to fully develop the typology of rhythm. This study examines the rhythmic features of Malay, for which, to date, relatively little work has been carried out on aspects rhythm and timing. The material for the analysis comprised 10 sentences produced by 20 speakers of standard Malay (10 males and 10 females). The recordings were first analysed using rhythm metrics proposed by Ramus et. al (1999) and Grabe & Low (2002). These metrics (∆C, %V, rPVI, nPVI) are based on durational measurements of vocalic and consonantal intervals. The results indicated that Malay clustered with other so-called syllable-timed languages like French and Spanish on the basis of all metrics. However, underlying the overall findings for these metrics there was a large degree of variability in values across speakers and sentences, with some speakers having values in the range typical of stressed-timed languages like English. Further analysis has been carried out in light of Fletcher’s (in press) argument that measurements based on duration do not wholly reflect speech rhythm as there are many other factors that can influence values of consonantal and vocalic intervals, and Arvaniti’s (2009) suggestion that other features of speech should also be considered in description of rhythm to discover what contributes to listeners’ perception of regularity. Spectrographic analysis of the Malay recordings brought to light two parameters that displayed consistency and regularity for all speakers and sentences: the duration of individual vowels and the duration of intervals between intensity minima. This poster presents the results of these investigations and points to connections between the features which seem to be consistently regulated in the timing of Malay connected speech and aspects of Malay phonology. The results are discussed in light of current debate on the descriptions of rhythm