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

Methodological Issues in a Real-Time Study of Glaswegian Vowels: Automation and Comparability

No abstract available

Measuring Mimicry in Task-Oriented Conversations: The More the Task is Difficult, The More we Mimick our Interlocutors

The tendency to unconsciously imitate others in conversations is referred to as mimicry, accommodation, interpersonal adap- tation, etc. During the last years, the computing community has made significant efforts towards the automatic detection of the phenomenon, but a widely accepted approach is still miss- ing. Given that mimicry is the unconscious tendency to imitate others, this article proposes the adoption of speaker verification methodologies that were originally conceived to spot people trying to forge the voice of others. Preliminary experiments suggest that mimicry can be detected by measuring how much speakers converge or diverge with respect to one another in terms of acoustic evidence. As a validation of the approach, the experiments show that convergence (the speakers become more similar in terms of acoustic properties) tends to appear more frequently when a task is difficult and, therefore, requires more time to be addressed

Utilising Hidden Markov Modelling for the Assessment of Accommodation in Conversational Speech

The work presented here suggests a method for assessing speech accommodation in a holistic acoustic manner by utilising Hidden Markov Models (HMMs). The rationale for implementation of this method is presented along with an explanation of how HMMs work. Here, a heavily simplified HMM is used (single state; mixture of gaussians) in order to assess the applicability of more sophisticated HMMs. Results are presented from a small-scale study of six pairs of female Scottish-English speakers, showing measurement of significant trends and changes in holistic acoustic features of speakers during conversational interaction. Our findings suggest that methods integrating HMMs with current holistic acoustic measures of speech may be a useful tool in accounting for acoustic change due to speaker interaction

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 Role of Tapping in Improving Connected Speech Comprehension of a Non-Native Variety of English

No abstract available

Voice quality and coda /r/ in Glasgow English in the early 20th century

We present acoustic and auditory analyses of changes to coda /r/ and voice quality in Glasgow English in the early twentieth century. Our initial acoustic analysis suggests that /r/ was weakening across the board based on an increase in F3. However, an auditory analysis of the same data finds no significant changes. An acoustic analysis of the same speakers’ vowels reveals that the shift in F3 is not unique to /r/. It reflects a change in voice quality, which we link to velarization using Vocal Profile Analysis. We then reanalyze the acoustic /r/ data, controlling for voice quality, and find only moderate changes that are restricted to females. These findings provide new evidence for diachronic changes in voice quality, contribute to our understanding of the development of /r/ in Glasgow English, and highlight the importance of investigating speech sounds in their broader context using multiple methodologies

Scotland - Glasgow and the Central Belt

Cambridgecaslpub4747pu

The Effects of Syllable and Sentential Position on the Timing of Lingual Gestures in /l/ and /r/

This paper is an ultrasound-based articulatory study of the impact of syllable-position and utterance position on gesture timing in liquid consonants in American, Irish and Scottish English. Mixed effects modelling was used to analyse variation in the relative timing of the anterior and posterior lingual gestures for /l/ and /r/ in syllable-onset and coda position and in utterance-initial, medial and final position. Results showed that the component lingual gestures for /l/ and /r/ are coordinated differently in onsets and codas, across the three varieties studied; the anterior lingual gesture tends to precede the posterior gesture in syllable-onset liquids, while this gesture order is reversed for syllable-coda liquids. For /l/, but not /r/, being in utterance-initial and final position results in a significantly increased temporal distance between the two lingual gestures. For coda /r/, prerhotic vowels were found to have a significant impact on the relative timing of lingual gestures