Sociophonetic variation in a long-term language contact situation: /l/-darkening in Welsh-English bilingual speech

This study investigates /l/-darkening in the Welsh and English speech of bilinguals in North Wales. Although it is claimed that /l/ is dark in all syllable positions in northern varieties of both languages, there have been no quantitative investigations of this feature which consider cross-linguistic phonetic differences, the differing nature of language contact between North East and North West Wales, and differences in the way both languages are acquired by speakers. The dataset of 32 Welsh-English bilinguals, aged 16-18, was stratified by speaker sex, home language, and area. Tokens of /l/ in word-initial onset and word-final coda positions were analysed acoustically. The results show cross-linguistic differences in onset position and that such differences were found to be greater in the speech of female participants and those from North West Wales. Differences were also found between Welsh-dominant and English-dominant communities. These results are discussed with reference to the influence of extra-linguistic factors on speech production and the possible social meaning associated with dark /l/

Co-variation of acoustic parameters in prosody

We have studied two aspects of co-variation. One is inherent in the speech production mechanism, in particular the voice source and its dependency of subglottal pressure and F0. These relations explain how speech intensity co-varies with F0 in connected speech, which has led us to define a mid-frequency F0r in a speaker’s available intonation range. The upper part, F0>Fr, conveys sentence and focal accentuation. Here the sound pressure level SPL saturates with increasing prominence. The role of subglottal pressure contours in shaping prosodic boundaries, e.g. at terminal junctures, has been given a renewed attention. We have observed an asynchronic timing of F0 and subglottal pressure. F0 peaks tend to lag subglottal maxima. Phoneme and syllable duration, F0 peak levels and also SPL are highly correlated with our prominence parameter RS. Individual variations exist, especially at very high prominence levels. 1