The vowels of Australian Aboriginal English (original) (raw)
Related papers
Phonological voicing contrasts in Australian Aboriginal languages
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.
The consonant systems of Australian Aboriginal languages, whilst not particularly large, are very 'long and thin' -i.e. they have unusually few contrasts in the traditional vertical dimension on the IPA chart (manner of articulation), an unusually large number in the horizontal dimension (place of articulation) and no voicing contrast. Whilst three or four manner features may be sufficient, some 8 or 9 place features are needed for a theoretically adequate analysis. Our articulatory and acoustic studies show that many of the prosodic contrasts (stress, focus…) are realised in the durational and spectral characteristics of the coda consonants rather than of the vowels. Furthermore there seems to be a very strong imperative to preserve place of articulation distinctions. In connected speech Australian languages are resistant to some anticipatory processes common in other languages, such as assimilation of nasality and of place of articulation, leading to the enhancement of the left edge of consonants. Our acoustic measurements confirm that, in contradistinction to English, the stability of VC combinations is on a par with that of CV combinations.The paper discusses the interplay between the unusual feature configurations of these languages, their phonotactics and the phonetic realisations of these contrasts. It would appear that natural classes can be defined more satisfactorily in terms of articulatory features rather than acoustic features.
Prosodic effects on vowel spectra in three Australian languages
Proceedings of Speech Prosody 7, Dublin Ireland, 2014
In this paper, the spectral properties of vowels in three Australian languages are examined with the aim of determining whether prosodic prominence and domain-edge effects on formant frequencies, formant variability and vowel space dispersion can be identified. It is shown that these vowel systems are sufficiently dispersed, with an anchoring of the system by the open central vowel. It is also shown that for Burarra but not for Gupapuyngu or Warlpiri there is some evidence of prosodically-driven hyper-articulation. Finally, the data indicate pre-boundary lengthening in all three languages, which in some cases appears to be associated with changes in vowel quality.
Vowels in Wunambal, a Language of the North West Kimberley Region
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.
An acoustic comparison of Australian and New Zealand English vowel change
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.
Comparing acoustic analyses of Australian English vowels from Sydney: Cox (2006) versus AusTalk
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 ...
Static vs dynamic perspectives on the realization of vowel nuclei in West Australian English
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.
Articulation of Vowel Length Contrasts in Australian English
Interspeech 2019
The articulatory realisation of phonemic vowel length contrasts is still imperfectly understood. Australian English (AusE) /5:/ and /5/ differ primarily in duration and therefore provide an ideal case for examining the articulatory properties of long vs. short vowels. Patterns of compression, acceleration ratios and VC coordination were examined using electromagnetic articulography (EMA) in /pV:p/ and /pVp/ syllables produced by three speakers of AusE at two speech rates. Short vowels were less compressible and had higher acceleration ratios than long vowels. VC rimes had proportionately earlier coda onsets than V:C rimes. These findings suggest that long and short vowels are characterised by different patterns of both intra-and intergestural organisation in AusE.