The role of gesture delay in coda /r/ weakening: an articulatory, auditory and acoustic study

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

The Effects of Syllable and Utterance Position on Tongue Shape and Gestural Magnitude in /l/ and /r/

This paper is an ultrasound-based articulatory study of the impact of syllable-position and utterance position on tongue shape and tongue-gesture magnitude in liquid consonants in American, Irish and Scottish English. Mixed effects modelling was used to analyse variation in normalised tonguegesture magnitude for /r/ and /l/ in syllable-onset and coda position and in utterance-initial, medial and final position. Variation between onset and coda mean midsagittal tongue surfaces was also quantified using normalised root-mean-square distances, and patterns of articulatory onset-coda allophony were identified. Despite the fact that some speakers in all varieties used tip-up /r/ in syllable-onset position and bunched /r/ in coda position, RMS distance results show greater degrees of similarity between onset and coda /r/ than between onset and coda /l/. Gesture magnitude was significantly reduced for both /l/ and /r/ in coda position. Utterance position had a significant effect on /l/ only

Derhoticisation in Scottish English: a sociophonetic journey

Item deposited in University of Glasgow (Enlighten) repository on 10 April 2014, available at: http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/87460/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).The research presented here was supported by awards to Jane Stuart-Smith from the Leverhulme Trust (F/179/AX), the AHRC, and the ESRC (R000239757), and to James M. Scobbie and Jane Stuart-Smith, from the ESRC,RES-000-22-2032 and RES-062-23-3246.caslpub3084pu

A mimicry study of adaptation towards socially-salient tongue shape variants

casl20pub3596pub

Looking variation and change in the mouth: developing the sociolinguistic potential of Ultrasound Tongue Imaging.

EdinburghThe central goal of this project is to meet a pressing need: to enable the investigation of how speakers from anywhere on a socio-dialectal spectrum physically articulate speech.caslESRC Project RES-000-22-2032pub2011pu

The role of anterior lingual gesture delay in coda /r/ lenition: An ultrasound tongue imaging study

We investigate the contribution that lingual gesture delay makes to lenition of postvocalic /r/. This study uses a socially-stratified, audio-ultrasound corpus of Scottish English containing recordings from two sociolects; one with postvocalic /r/ weakening and the other with strengthening. We quantify auditory strength of rhoticity and the timing of the anterior lingual gesture relative to the offset of voicing in CVr words: bar, bore, fur, or onset of a following consonant in CVrC words: farm, herb, burp, in order to show that there is a statistically significant correlation between weak rhoticity and a late articulatory gesture. Our ultrasound data also show that during the process of final consonant vocalization/deletion, underlying articulatory gestures may persist.https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/icphs/icphs2015caslpub3941pub33

The effects of syllable and utterance position on tongue shape and gestural magnitude in /l/ and /r/

James Scobbie - ORCID: 0000-0003-4509-6782 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4509-6782Item deposited in University of Glasgow repository (Enlighten) on 11th April 2019, available at: http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/183814/Paper number:This paper is an ultrasound-based articulatory study of the impact of syllable-position and utterance position on tongue shape and tongue-gesture magnitude in liquid consonants in American, Irish and Scottish English. Mixed effects modelling was used to analyse variation in normalised tongue-gesture magnitude for /r/ and /l/ in syllable-onset and coda position and in utterance-initial, medial and final position. Variation between onset and coda mean midsagittal tongue surfaces was also quantified using normalised root-mean-square distances, and patterns of articulatory onset-coda allophony were identified. Despite the fact that some speakers in all varieties used tip-up /r/ in syllable-onset position and bunched /r/ in coda position, RMS distance results show greater degrees of similarity between onset and coda /r/ than between onset and coda /l/. Gesture magnitude was significantly reduced for both /l/ and /r/ in coda position. Utterance position had a significant effect on /l/ only.https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/content/icphsinpressinpres

Viewing speech in action: speech articulation videos in the public domain that demonstrate the sounds of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)

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