Dodsworth, Robin

Fruehwald, Josef

Holley, Jordan

Kendall, Tyler

McAulliffe, Michael

Mielke, Jeff

Sonderegger, Morgan

Stuart-Smith, Jane

Thomas, Erik

Edinburgh Research Explorer

     Edinburgh Research Explorer                                      Age vectors vs. axes of intraspeaker variation for vowel formantsin North American and Scottish EnglishCitation for published version:Thomas, E, Mielke, J, Fruehwald, J, Holley, J, McAulliffe, M, Sonderegger, M, Stuart-Smith, J, Dodsworth, R& Kendall, T 2018, 'Age vectors vs. axes of intraspeaker variation for vowel formants in North American andScottish English' LabPhon 16, Lisbon, Portugal, 19/06/18 - 22/06/18, .Link:Link to publication record in Edinburgh Research ExplorerDocument Version:Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of recordGeneral rightsCopyright for the publications made accessible via the Edinburgh Research Explorer is retained by the author(s)and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise andabide by the legal requirements associated with these rights.Take down policyThe University of Edinburgh has made every reasonable effort to ensure that Edinburgh Research Explorercontent complies with UK legislation. If you believe that the public display of this file breaches copyright pleasecontact openaccess@ed.ac.uk providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately andinvestigate your claim.Download date: 30. Jun. 2018Age vectors vs. axes of intraspeaker variation for vowel formantsin North American and Scottish EnglishErik R. Thomas∗, Jeff Mielke∗, Josef Fruehwald†, Jordan Holley∗, Michael McAuliffe‡, Morgan Sonderegger‡,Jane Stuart-Smith§, Robin Dodsworth∗, and Tyler Kendall¶∗ North Carolina State University, † University of Edinburgh, ‡ McGill University, § University of Glasgow, ¶ University of OregonIntroductionWe examine vowel formant variation in several naturalspeech corpora of North American and United KingdomEnglish. Labov (1994) has suggested that a speaker’stokens of a particular vowel will be aligned along an axiscoinciding with the direction that vowel is shiftingdiachronically in a given community. We compare thedirection of change in apparent time with the axis ofintraspeaker variation, for several vowel phonemes, inorder to test this assertion. This is an opportunity to usePolyglot (McAuliffe et al. 2017, Figure 1) for large-scalevowel analysis. This is phase one of a project which willmeasure dozens of English corpora from both sides of theAtlantic.Datasets (speech corpora, lexicons)DatabaseimportEnrichment(e.g. acoustc and suprasegmentalInformaton, word frequency, speaker metadata)querySet of linguistc objectsData fle (CSV)exportPolyglot/ISCAN  Python command line library/Graphical User Interface (under development)ISCAN inspecton interface(under development)CSVimporterTool for user friendly, large-scale, ethically non-invasive automated acoustc analysis of speech datasetsMcAulife et al. (2017) InterspeechFigure 1: The Polyglot/ISCAN system for acoustic analysis of speech datasetsDataWe measured 547,344 stressed vowels from six speechcorpora:Santa Barbara corpus subsets (Western U.S. andNorthern Cities, Du Bois et al. 2000)Raleigh corpus (Raleigh, North Carolina, U.S. urbanSouth, Dodsworth and Kohn 2012)Buckeye corpus (Columbus, Ohio, U.S. NorthMidland, Pitt et al. 2007)International Corpus of English, Canadiansubset (ICE-CAN) (Canada, Greenbaum andNelson 1996)Sounds of the City corpus (Glasgow, Scotland,Stuart-Smith 2014)Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech(SCOTS) (Scotland, Anderson et al. 2007)The analysis is limited to words that are not known tohave been involved in context-sensitive change in any ofthe dialects under study, determined using UNISYN (Fitt2000).MethodsPolyglot was used to measure F1 and F2 at thenucleus (1/3 time point) of each vowel.Optimal formant measurements for each token wereselected in a FAVE-like (Rosenfelder et al. 2011)manner using prototypes for each category. The firstpass was based on corrected and prunedmeasurements of the same corpora, and thenprototypes were re-estimated for each speaker’s datafive times.Selected formant measurements were normalizedusing the Lobanov method (Lobanov 1971). Speakermedians for various vowel categories are shown inFigure 2.Age vectors (thick arrows in Figure 3) werecalculated using the mean normalized F1 and F2measurements for the oldest and youngest generationwithin each corpus (young vs. old for Buckeye, birthyear before 1950 vs. after 1967 for Raleigh andSCOTS, older and 1980s middle-aged vs. 1980s-2000syoung for Sounds of the City, birth year beforevs. after 1950 for ICE-CAN, and age at recording overvs. under 35 for Santa Barbara.Axes of intraspeaker variation (dotted linesegments in Figure 3) were found by performing aprincipal component analysis for F1 and F2 of eachspeaker-vowel combination with at least 20 tokens.The loadings were used to calculate the angle of themain axis of variation for each speaker-vowelcombination. These were averaged across speakerswithin each regionally-defined group. The length ofeach line segment represents the mean standarddeviation of vowel variation along the axis.AcknowledgmentsThe U.S. portion of this project is supported by NSF grantSMA-1730479, the Canadian portion of this project issupported by SSHRC and NSERC, and the U.K. portion ofthis project is supported by AHRC and ESRC. The map iscourtesy of the National Library of Scotland. Thanks alsoto Arlie Coles and Rachel Macdonald.2 1 0 -1 -2210-1-2Western U.S.normalized F2normalized F1iɪeɛæʌɑɑlɔ ɔloolʊu ul2 1 0 -1 -2210-1-2Western U.S.normalized F2normalized F12 1 0 -1 -2210-1-2Raleigh, NC (U.S. urban South)normalized F2normalized F1iɪeɛæʌɑ ɑlɔlo olʊu ul2 1 0 -1 -2210-1-2Raleigh, NC (U.S. urban South)normalized F2normalized F12 1 0 -1 -2210-1-2Columbus, Ohio (U.S. North Midland)normalized F2normalized F1iɪe ɛæʌɑ ɑlɔ ɔlo olʊuul2 1 0 -1 -2210-1-2Columbus, Ohio (U.S. North Midland)normalized F2normalized F12 1 0 -1 -2210-1-2U.S. Northern Citiesnormalized F2normalized F1iɪeɛæʌɑɑlɔ ɔloolʊuul2 1 0 -1 -2210-1-2U.S. Northern Citiesnormalized F2normalized F12 1 0 -1 -2210-1-2Canadanormalized F2normalized F1iɪeɛæʌɑ ɑlɔɔloolʊuul2 1 0 -1 -2210-1-2Canadanormalized F2normalized F12 1 0 -1 -2210-1-2Glasgow, Scotlandnormalized F2normalized F1iɪeɛæʌɑ ɑlɔɔlo oluul2 1 0 -1 -2210-1-2Glasgow, Scotlandnormalized F2normalized F12 1 0 -1 -2210-1-2Scotland in generalnormalized F2normalized F1iɪeɛæʌ ɑɑlɔɔlo olu ul2 1 0 -1 -2210-1-2Scotland in generalnormalized F2normalized F1Figure 2: Left: speaker medians for selected vowel categories groupedby dialect/corpus; Right: convex hulls for each speaker’s vowel spaces,with speaker median GOOSE vowels (/u/) highlighted2.0 1.5 1.0 0.5 0.0 -0.5 -1.0210-1-2Age vectors and axes of variationnormalized F2normalized F1SB_WestRaleighBuckeyeSB_NCSICECANSOTCSCOTSFLEECEGOOSEFACEGOATTRAP THOUGHTFigure 3: Age vectors (reflecting change in apparent time; arrows) andaxes of intra-speaker variation (dotted lines) for six vowels acrossseven groups of speakers from six corpora.ConclusionsIn the majority of cases, there is no obviousconnection between age vectors and axes ofintra-speaker variation, as Figure 3 shows.For most vowels, the axis of intraspeaker variationwas aligned vertically, presumably corresponding tothe degree of jaw opening for individual tokens.The goose vowel in North American English is animportant exception: the axis of intraspeakervariation is aligned horizontally, which also happens tobe the axis of diachronic change for this vowel acrossNorth America.The horizontal alignment differentiated goose fromthe less flat orientation of the other high, tense vowel(fleece); from the vertical orientations of otherrounded vowels such as thought and goat; andeven from the vertical orientations observed forgoose in the two Scottish corpora.This anomalous goose pattern calls for anexplanation, but it may help to explain why frontingand unrounding of high back vowels are commonshifts across languages.BibliographyAnderson, J., D. Beavan, and C. Kay. 2007. SCOTS: Scottish corpus of texts and speech. InCreating and digitizing language corpora, 17–34. Palgrave Macmillan UK.Dodsworth, Robin, and Mary Kohn. 2012. Urban rejection of the vernacular: The SVS undone.Language Variation and Change 24:221–245.Du Bois, J. W., W. L. Chafe, C. Meyer, S. A. Thompson, and N. Martey. 2000. Santa BarbaraCorpus of Spoken American English. Linguistic Data Consortium CD-ROM.Fitt, Susan. 2000. Documentation and user guide to unisyn lexicon and post-lexical rules. URLhttp://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/unisyn/, technical Report, Centre for SpeechTechnology Research, University of Edinburgh.Greenbaum, S., and G. Nelson. 1996. The international corpus of English (ICE) project. WorldEnglishes 15:3–15.Labov, William. 1994. Principles of linguistic change: Internal factors. Oxford: Blackwell.Lobanov, Boris M. 1971. Classification of russian vowels spoken by different speakers. Journal of theAcoustical Society of America 49:606–608.McAuliffe, M., E. Stengel-Eskin, M. Socolof, and M. Sonderegger. 2017. Polyglot and speech corpustools: a system for representing, integrating, and querying speech corpora. In Interspeech 2017 ,3887–3891. URLhttps://www.isca-speech.org/archive/Interspeech_2017/pdfs/1390.PDF.Pitt, Mark A., Laura Dilley, Keith Johnson, Scott Kiesling, William Raymond, Elizabeth Hume, andEric Fosler-Lussier. 2007. Buckeye Corpus of conversational speech (2nd release)[www.buckeyecorpus.osu.edu]. Columbus, OH.Rosenfelder, Ingrid, Joe Fruehwald, Keelan Evanini, and Jiahong Yuan. 2011. FAVE (ForcedAlignment and Vowel Extraction) Program Suite. URL http://fave.ling.upenn.edu.Stuart-Smith, Jane. 2014. Fine phonetic variation and sound change: A real-time study ofGlaswegian. Final Report: RPG-142 (Sounds of the City).LabPhon 16, Faculdade de Letras, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal, June 19-22, 2018 www.spade.glasgow.ac.uk, arts-spade@glasgow.ac.uk

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Age vectors vs. axes of intraspeaker variation for vowel formants in North American and Scottish English

Age vectors vs. axes of intraspeaker variation for vowel formants in North American and Scottish English

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