An ultrasound exploration of Australian English /CVl/ words

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

Most dialects of North American English exhibit /ae/-raising in some phonological contexts. Both the conditioning environments and the temporal dynamics of the raising vary from region to region. To explore the articulatory basis of /ae/-raising across North American English dialects, acoustic and articulatory data were collected from a regionally diverse group of 24 English speakers from the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. A method for examining the temporal dynamics of speech directly from ultrasound video using EigenTongues decomposition [Hueber, Aversano, Chollet, Denby, Dreyfus, Oussar, Roussel, and Stone (2007). in IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (Cascadilla, Honolulu, HI)] was applied to extract principal components of filtered images and linear regression to relate articulatory variation to its acoustic consequences. This technique was used to investigate the tongue movements involved in /ae/ production, in order to compare the tongue gestures involved in the various /ae/-raising patterns, and to relate them to their apparent phonetic motivations (nasalization, voicing, and tongue position). V

2015

This paper reports on an exploratory study of the application of different types of analysis method to the characterization of the acoustic properties of vowel realization in the performance of speakers of West Australian English (West AusE). Tense monophthongs and diphthongs produced in a word list by 18 speakers of West AusE were analysed using three different methods, two static and one dynamic. Results differ across the three methods with the dynamic analysis yielding substantially more detail and differentiation between and within vowel categories. Our findings enhance knowledge of a variety which has received scant attention in existing phonetic studies of AusE, and more generally contribute to the on-going discussion in the literature about which approach to acoustic analysis provides the best means of capturing the properties of vowel realization and variability.

Proceedings of the 10th Australian International …, 2004

This paper presents an acoustic description of changes occurring in the front lax vowels of Australian English (AE) over a forty year period. It contrasts these to the changes in the equivalent NZE vowels over the same time period. Results suggest that during this period, AE and NZE front lax vowels have been diverging from previously similar productions, with a greater shift apparent in NZE vowels than in AE vowels.

2019

This paper investigates a merger-in-progress of /e//æ/ in prelateral contexts for speakers of Australian English in Victoria. Twelve participants (7F, 5M) were recorded producing a wordlist resulting in acoustic and concurrent articulatory data via stabilised mid-sagittal ultrasound tongue imaging. Focusing on a subset of the data comprising short front vowels /ɪ, e, æ/ in /hVt/ and /hVl/ contexts, findings show that there are robust acoustic differences between /e/ and /æ/ preceding /t/, as anticipated. However, individual differences emerge for /e/ and /æ/ preceding /l/, with highly gradient production patterns across the speakers, ranging from speakers who exhibit merger behaviour to those who maintain categorical distinctions. The evidence for merging behaviour across speakers is similar, but does not map directly, across both the acoustic and articulatory data, and illustrates the value of incorporating a range of data types in investigating a merger-in-progress.

Proceedings of the International Congress for the Phonetic Sciences, Melbourne, 2019

This paper investigates a merger-in-progress of /e/-/ae/ in prelateral contexts for speakers of Australian English in Victoria. Twelve participants (7F, 5M) were recorded producing a wordlist resulting in acoustic and concurrent articulatory data via stabilised mid-sagittal ultrasound tongue imaging. Focusing on a subset of the data comprising short front vowels /ɪ, e, ae/ in /hVt/ and /hVl/ contexts, findings show that there are robust acoustic differences between /e/ and /ae/ preceding /t/, as anticipated. However, individual differences emerge for /e/ and /ae/ preceding /l/, with highly gradient production patterns across the speakers, ranging from speakers who exhibit merger behaviour to those who maintain categorical distinctions. The evidence for merging behaviour across speakers is similar, but does not map directly, across both the acoustic and articulatory data, and illustrates the value of incorporating a range of data types in investigating a merger-in-progress.

In this paper we provide an overview of dorsovelar articulations and acoustics in several Australian Aboriginal languages, and we compare these results with data from English. We examine languages that have a single dorsal, as well as languages that have two dorsal places of articulation. Using direct palatography and F 2 transition measures, we show that Australian languages appear to have a distinct velar target for each of the three major vowel contexts, with a high degree of coarticulation between each velar allophone and its following vowel target, whilst English has only two velar targets -back and non-back, with a lower degree of coarticulation between velar allophones and their corresponding vowel targets. Thus, whilst the range of allophonic variation for velars extends further back in the Australian Aboriginal languages than in English, there appears to be no difference in the articulation of velars in the front vowel context. Drawing on results from the biomechanics, language acquisition, speech perception and acoustics literatures, we suggest that this result may be due to conflict between systemic constraints imposed by the placerich consonant systems of Aboriginal languages and universal acoustic constraints on the identity of front-velar sounds, which may contribute to the instability of such articulations and the relative infrequency of velar + high vowel combinations in the world's languages.

This study provides a thorough acoustic analysis of the 18 Australian English monophthongs and diphthongs produced in a variety of phonetic contexts by young adult speakers from Western Sydney. The 18 vowels are well separated by duration and mean and dynamic formant trajectory information. Vowel durations and formant trajectories were affected by the consonantal context in which they were produced, particularly those produced in the /hVd/ context. Finally, the results indicate that capturing aspects of vowel inherent spectral change may be useful in future cross-dialectal and cross-linguistic studies. Copyright 2016 Acoustical Society of America

International Journal of Speech-language Pathology, 2008

Transcription is an essential clinical tool for speech-language pathologists as it provides a permanent written record of communicative behaviour and forms an important source of data for analysis, interpretation, decision making, and dissemination. One of the responsibilities in speech-language pathology is to faithfully capture the speech production characteristics of clinical populations so that informed management decisions may be made. Notation systems that are appropriately suited for this purpose are mandatory. In Australia today, the conventional phonemic transcription system was first described over 60 years ago. However, an alternative to this traditional system has more recently been proposed by Harrington, Cox and Evans (HCE). This paper details the HCE system and argues its advantage as a clinical tool for speechlanguage pathologists in Australia. This new system provides a more accurate phonetically oriented foundation against which atypical vowel production can be assessed. It is further argued that the HCE system can form the basis for narrower phonetic examination and has pedagogical value in the description of Standard Australian English.

Basilectal varieties of Australian Aboriginal English (AAE), which are heavily influenced by the indigenous substrate, may have a very restricted set of vowels compared to Standard Australian English (SAE). A comparison of the vowels of a small group of acrolectal AAE speakers with those of the standard accent suggests that even in varieties with the same set of phonemes as SAE, speakers are using a somewhat smaller phonetic vowel space. The lower boundaries of the AAE and indigenous language spaces are very similar and, whereas the SAE vowel space represents an expansion in all directions compared with the indigenous space, the AAE space represents an expansion in an 'upward' (lower F1) direction only. Within their respective spaces, the relative positions of the monophthongs are quite similar in SAE and AAE. Diphthong trajectories are also similar, except that some have shorter trajectories (more centralised second targets) in AAE. Most of the differences there are can be ...

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2014

Durational contrasts are used not only to signal phrasal boundaries and focused constituents, but also to make phonemic distinctions. Boundary and focus effects can therefore interact with phonemic length contrasts, presenting a challenge for learners. Boundary effects are most clearly seen in the syllable rhyme, where the nucleus and coda are longer in utterance-final compared to utterance-medial position, the magnitude of lengthening diminishing leftward from the end of the word. In the case of focus, where the nucleus and coda are also lengthened, the magnitude of lengthening diminishes rightwards toward the end of the word. The goal of this paper was therefore to compare productions of the phonemic vowel length contrast /AE+/ vs /AE/ in adults and 3-yr-old children learning Australian English in the face of competing demands from boundary and focus lengthening. The results showed that the children maintain the /AE+/ vs /AE/ contrast across prosodic contexts. They are also able to implement an adult-like pattern of boundary-related lengthening, but are still developing focus-related lengthening. The findings suggest that these 3-yr-olds have good command of the phonemic vowel length contrast, but are still fine-tuning language-specific aspects of temporal organization (i.e., the vowel-coda trading relationship) within the rhyme.