A single case study of articulatory adaptation during acoustic mimicry

The distribution of fine-grained phonetic variation can be observed in the speech of members of welldefined social groups. It is evident that such variation must somehow be able to propagate through a speech community from speaker to hearer. However, technological barriers have meant that close and direct study of the articulatory links of this speaker-hearer chain has not, to date, been possible. We present the results of a singlecase study using an ultrasound-based method to investigate temporal and configurational lingual adaptation during mimicry. Our study focuses on allophonic variants of postvocalic /r/ found in speech from Central Scotland. Our results show that our informant was able to adjust tongue gesture timing towards that of the stimulus, but did not alter tongue configuration

Socially-stratified sampling in laboratory-based phonological experimentation

Oxfordcaslpub2281pu

Quasi-phonemic contrast and the fuzzy inventory: examples from Scottish English

No abstract available

Back to front: a socially-stratified ultrasound tongue imaging study of Scottish English /u/

casl24pub2538pub

The social stratification of tongue shape for postvocalic /r/ in Scottish English

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

Liquids

No abstract available

Assessing the link between speech perception and production through individual differences

This study aims to test a prediction of recent theoretical frameworks in speech motor control: if speech production targets are specified in auditory terms, people with better auditory acuity should have more precise speech targets. To investigate this, we had participants perform speech perception and production tasks in a counterbalanced order. To assess speech perception acuity, we used an adaptive speech discrimination task. To assess variability in speech production, participants performed a pseudo-word reading task; formant values were measured for each recording. We predicted that speech production variability to correlate inversely with discrimination performance. The results suggest that people do vary in their production and perceptual abilities, and that better discriminators have more distinctive vowel production targets, confirming our prediction. This study highlights the importance of individual differences in the study of speech motor control, and sheds light on speech production-perception interaction

Polynomial modeling of child and adult intonation in German spontaneous speech

de Ruiter L. Polynomial modeling of child and adult intonation in German spontaneous speech. Language and Speech. 2011;54(2):199-223.In a data set of 291 spontaneous utterances from German 5-year-olds, 7-year-olds and adults, nuclear pitch contours were labeled manually using the GToBI annotation system. Ten different contour types were identified.The fundamental frequency (F0) of these contours was modeled using third-order orthogonal polynomials, following an approach similar to the one Grabe, Kochanski, and Coleman (2007) used for English. Statistical analyses showed that all but one contour pair differed significantly from each other in at least one of the four coefficients. This demonstrates that polynomial modeling can provide quantitative empirical support for phonological labels in unscripted speech, and for languages other than English. Furthermore, polynomial expressions can be used to derive the alignment of tonal targets relative to the syllable structure, making polynomial modeling more accessible to the phonological research community. Finally, within-contour comparisons of the three age groups showed that for children, the magnitude of the higher coefficients is lower, suggesting that they are not yet able to modulate their pitch as fast as adults