Prosodic effects on vowel spectra in three Australian languages

Australian Journal of Linguistics, 2015

ABSTRACT This paper presents an acoustic-phonetic analysis of vowel data from recordings of Wunambal, a Worrorran language of the Kimberley region in North West Australia. Wunambal has been analysed as a six vowel system with the contrasts /i e a o u ɨ/, with /ɨ/ only found in the Northern variety. Recordings from three senior (60+) male speakers of Northern Wunambal were used for this study. These recordings were originally made for documentation of lexical items. All vowel tokens were drawn from words in short carrier phrases, or words in isolation, and we compare vowels from both accented and unaccented contexts. We demonstrate a remarkably symmetrical vowel space, highlighting where the six vowels lie acoustically in relation to each other for the three speakers overall, and for each speaker individually. While all speakers in our corpus used the /ɨ/ vowel, the allophony observed suggests that it has a somewhat different phonemic status than other vowels. Accented and unaccented vowels are not significantly different for any speaker, and are similarly distributed in acoustic space.

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.

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

This study presents formant transition data from 21 speakers for the apical alveolarretroflex contrast in three neighbouring Central Australian languages: Arrernte, Pitjantjatjara, and Warlpiri. The contrast is examined for three manners of articulation: stop, nasal, and lateral /t Ô/ /n î/, and /l ì/, and three vowel contexts /a i u/. As expected, results show that a lower F3 and F4 in the preceding vowel signal a retroflex consonant; and that the alveolarretroflex contrast is most clearly realized in the context of an /a/ vowel, and least clearly realized in the context of an /i/ vowel. Results also show that the contrast is most clearly realized for the stop manner of articulation. These results provide an acoustic basis for the greater typological rarity of retroflex nasals and laterals as compared to stops. It is suggested that possible nasalization of the preceding vowel accounts for the poorer nasal consonant results, and that articulatory constraints on lateral consonant production account for the poorer lateral consonant results. Importantly, differences are noticed between speakers, and it is suggested that literacy plays a major role in maintenance of this marginal phonemic contrast.

… and techniques, ed. JM Harrington & M. …, 2006

La Trobe Working Papers in Linguistics 1:17–42, 1988

It is widely known that the phonological systems of Australian Aboriginal languages show many similarities right across the continent. One characteristic of these systems that has been often reported is the lack in most languages of a phonological contrast between voiced and voiceless stops. This paper is an investigation of the occurrence of such a contrast in a number of widely scattered languages. It will be shown that, in a number of instances, phonological voicing is a recent historical development in the languages which have it, and the contrast has been subject to linguistic diffusion in one of the areas where it is found. Certain generalisations about the types of phonological voicing contrasts that tend to be found in Australia are also advanced.

Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2018

Australian English (AusE) /iː/, /ɪ/ and /ɪə/ exhibit almost identical average first (F1) and second (F2) formant frequencies and differ in duration and vowel inherent spectral change (VISC). The cues of duration, F1 × F2 trajectory direction (TD) and length (TL) were assessed in listeners’ categorization of /iː/ and /ɪə/ compared to /ɪ/. Duration was important for distinguishing both /iː/ and /ɪə/ from /ɪ/. TD and TL were important for categorizing /iː/ versus /ɪ/, whereas only TL was important for /ɪə/ versus /ɪ/. Finally, listeners’ use of duration and VISC was not mutually affected for either vowel compared to /ɪ/. © 2018 Acoustical Society of America

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.

2009

Speakers communicate pragmatic and discourse meaning through the prosodic form assigned to an utterance, and listeners must attend to the acoustic cues to prosodic form to fully recover the speaker's intended meaning. While much of the research on prosody examines supra-segmental cues such as F0 and temporal patterns, prosody is also known to affect the phonetic properties of segments as well. This paper reports on the effect of prosodic prominence on the formant patterns of vowels using speech data from the Buckeye corpus of spontaneous American English. A prosody annotation was obtained for a subset of this corpus based on the auditory perception of 97 ordinary, untrained listeners. To understand the relationship between prominence perception and formant structure, as a measure of the 'strength' of the vowel articulation, we measure the steady-state first and second formants of stressed vowels at vowel mid-points for monophthongs and at both 10% (nucleus) and 90% (glide) positions for diphthongs.

This study presents a comparison of the acoustic properties of Australian English monophthongs produced by 60 monolingual females from Sydney's Northern Beaches reported in Cox's [1] corpus and by the four monolingual females from Sydney recorded within the AusTalk corpus [2]. Cross-corpus discriminant analyses are used to investigate the acoustic similarity between the two corpora to determine whether the values from these corpora would be appropriate for predicting L2 difficulty in future cross-linguistic studies using Western Sydney speakers. Preliminary findings suggest that there is little overall acoustic similarity across these two vowel corpora as classification scores from the discriminant analyses were consistently higher for the Cox corpus than AusTalk. In particular, greatest variation between the two corpora is observed in their productions of front vowels. Limitations for drawing conclusions based on the current data are provided and the need for an additional ...

2006

Various assertions have been made from time to time in the literature about possible regional differences in the pronunciation of Australian English vowels. However, apart from a number of excellent studies of New South Wales speakers, we have very little recent data from other states to substantiate such assertions. This study presents formant frequency data from a group of > 90 young adult female speakers who grew up in South Australia. The results are compared with the most recent data from the most similar subjects in NSW. Amongst the monophthongs very few differences were observed. The major differences appeared amongst the diphthongs. The differences between the two accents are discussed in terms of conservative and innovative trends, without any definite conclusion being reached.