A sociophonetic analysis of vowels produced by female Irish migrants: Investigating second dialect contact in Melbourne (original) (raw)
Related papers
2018
This paper presents results of a vowel categorisation task of front lax vowels in /hVt/, /hVl/ and /mVl/ contexts, by 12 native Australian English speakers and 10 Irish migrants residing in Melbourne. Results show significant differences in how listeners categorise these vowels, in five out of six phonetic contexts. Vowels suggested to be undergoing merger in Victoria, specifically /el-æl/, are not perceived as merged, indicating this phenomenon may be stratified and/or more agegraded than previously reported. Results show clear differences between listeners sharing an L1 but speaking different dialects, even when these dialects are in direct contact due to migration.
Proceedings of the Seventeenth Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology, 2018
This paper presents results of a vowel categorisation task of front lax vowels in /hVt/, /hVl/ and /mVl/ contexts, by 12 native Australian English speakers and 10 Irish migrants residing in Melbourne. Results show significant differences in how listeners categorise these vowels, in five out of six phonetic contexts. Vowels suggested to be undergoing merger in Victoria, specifically /el-ael/, are not perceived as merged, indicating this phenomenon may be stratified and/or more age-graded than previously reported. Results show clear differences between listeners sharing an L1 but speaking different dialects, even when these dialects are in direct contact due to migration.
Vowel variation in a standard context across four major Australian cities
2019
Analysis of regional variation in Australian English (AusE) is limited in scope mainly through lack of access to sufficiently diverse speech corpora. Perhaps this helps to explain the long-held belief that regional phonological variation in AusE is quite restricted. Here we present analyses of vowels in a standard phonetic context from word-list data collected for the large-scale AusTalk corpus. The aim is to establish the first published baseline investigation of regional variation for vowels across speakers from four major Australian cities. Twelve monophthongs and 6 diphthongs were examined from 109 male and female speakers under 35 years from Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth. Using discrete cosine transform to capture time-varying formant detail, we found evidence for region-specific variation for a small set of vowels including GOAT, NEAR, GOOSE and THOUGHT. The results highlight the need for more detailed analysis of a wider range of phonetic, stylistic, social and region...
Sociophonetic Variation in Vowel Categorization of Australian English
Language and Speech, 2023
This study involves a perceptual categorization task for Australian English, designed to investigate regional and social variation in category boundaries between close-front vowel contrasts. Data are from four locations in southeast Australia. A total of 81 listeners from two listener groups took part: (a) so-called mainstream Australian English listeners from all four locations, and (b) L1 Aboriginal English listeners from one of the locations. Listeners heard front vowels /ɪ e ae/ arranged in 7-step continua presented at random. Varied phonetic contexts were analyzed, with a focus on coda /l/ because of a well-known prelateral merger of /e ae/ through mid-vowel lowering (e.g., celery-salary) reported to occur in some communities in this part of Australia. The results indicate that regional variation in Australian English is evident in perception. In particular, merging of /el/-/ael/ is shown to occur in the southernmost regions analyzed, but rarely in the northern regions of the geographical area under investigation. Aside from regional variation observed, age was also a factor in how participants responded to the task: older speakers had more merger than younger speakers in many locations, which is a new finding-previously, the merger was thought to be increasing in frequency over time, yet here we see this in only one location. Aboriginal English listeners also responded differently when compared with mainstream Australian English listeners. By analyzing the perception results across a variety of regional locations, with data from two different Australian social groups in the same location, this study adds a new dimension to our understanding of regional and social variations in Australian English.
Ethnic variation in real time Change in Australian English diphthongs
Studies in Language Variation, 2021
Ethnic and ethnolectal variation in migrant communities have received much attention, but the manifestation and longevity of this variation is not yet well understood. Capitalising on Barbara Horvath's foundational study of social variation in Australian English, and a comparable, recent corpus of sociolinguistic interviews (Sydney Speaks 2010s), we present a real-time test of ethnic variation in the speech of approximately 170 Australians over a 40-year period. We examine the speech of Anglo-, Italian-and Chinese-Australians, focusing on five diphthongs considered to be characteristic of Australian English. Analyses of over 20,000 tokens reveal no wholesale differences among ethnic groups, but they do reveal some differences in the progression and social conditioning of changes over time, which we argue are best understood in relation to the social nature of the changes undergone.
Initiation, progression, and conditioning of the short-front vowel shift in Australia
2019
This paper investigates the initiation, progression, and conditioning of the short-front vowel shift in Australian English as observed in a sociolinguistic corpus capturing 40 years in real time (from the 1970s to today). Acoustic analyses of over 10,000 tokens reveal that the lowering and retraction of KIT, DRESS and TRAP was preceded by movement in BATH. This suggests that the short-front vowel shift was structurally triggered by BATH moving away from a canonical low position and providing room for TRAP retraction, mirroring the triggering event for similar shifts in other English dialects. We also find that while pre-obstruent TRAP lowers over time, pre-nasal TRAP maintains a high position, resulting in a split-nasal system. Additionally, variance in vowel categories appears to decrease as changes crystalise, suggesting that greater within-category variability is a precursor to vocalic movement. These findings bear on the short-front vowel shift as a worldwide phenomenon in English.
The vowels of Australian Aboriginal 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 ...
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 ...
Examining the /e/-/æ/ Merger in the Speech of Dutch Migrants in Australia
This study investigates the appearance of the /e/-/ae/ merger in the speech of Dutch migrants to Australia. There have been few studies on the overall appearance of this merger in Australia, which manifests as /ae/ neutralisation. Research for this study was carried out by obtaining voice samples of Australian (N=9) and Dutch (N=16) participants, who read English words from a list that included minimal pairs with pronunciations corresponding to the /e/ and /ae/ phonemes evident in Australian English. Recordings were then analysed in Praat to determine vowel position. The phoneme /ae/ is generally not used in the Dutch language, and the results showed that there is little realisation of /ae/ in the Dutch participants' speech. This study found that neutralisation has been occurring in the speech of Dutch migrants, but it corresponds to more retracted allophones of /ae/. The most significant results were the neutralisations around the phonetic values 1 for /ɛ/ and /a/, and the fact that the Dutch speakers have tended to front the /ɑ/ vowel of Standard Dutch to /a/.