The articulation of /ɹ/ in New Zealand English

2018 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 366-388 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthias Heyne ◽  
Xuan Wang ◽  
Donald Derrick ◽  
Kieran Dorreen ◽  
Kevin Watson
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
American English ◽  
Initial Position ◽  
Front Vowel ◽  
Linear Mixed Effects ◽  
Allophonic Variation ◽  
Variation Patterns ◽  
Curvature Index ◽  
Back Vowel ◽  
Speech Motor

This paper investigates the articulation of approximant /ɹ/ in New Zealand English (NZE), and tests whether the patterns documented for rhotic varieties of English hold in a non-rhotic dialect. Midsagittal ultrasound data for 62 speakers producing 13 tokens of /ɹ/ in various phonetic environments were categorized according to the taxonomy by Delattre & Freeman (1968), and semi-automatically traced and quantified using the AAA software (Articulate Instruments Ltd. 2012) and a Modified Curvature Index (MCI; Dawson, Tiede & Whalen 2016). Twenty-five NZE speakers produced tip-down /ɹ/ exclusively, 12 tip-up /ɹ/ exclusively, and 25 produced both, partially depending on context. Those speakers who produced both variants used the most tip-down /ɹ/ in front vowel contexts, the most tip-up /ɹ/ in back vowel contexts, and varying rates in low central vowel contexts. The NZE speakers produced tip-up /ɹ/ most often in word-initial position, followed by intervocalic, then coronal, and least often in velar contexts. The results indicate that the allophonic variation patterns of /ɹ/ in NZE are similar to those of American English (Mielke, Baker & Archangeli 2010, 2016). We show that MCI values can be used to facilitate /ɹ/ gesture classification; linear mixed-effects models fit on the MCI values of manually categorized tongue contours show significant differences between all but two of Delattre & Freeman's (1968) tongue types. Overall, the results support theories of modular speech motor control with articulation strategies evolving from local rather than global optimization processes, and a mechanical model of rhotic variation (see Stavness et al. 2012).

Towards a gestural characterization of liquids: Evidence from Spanish and Russian

2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Proctor
Keyword(s):  
American English ◽  
Front Vowel ◽  
Position Effects ◽  
Back Vowel ◽  
Target Locations ◽  
Syllable Position

AbstractThe production of intervocalic liquid consonants by five speakers of Spanish and four speakers of Russian was examined using ultrasound. Liquids in both languages were found to be united by a lower susceptibility to vocalic coarticulation than coronal obstruents produced in the same environments. Tongue body articulation in the Spanish lateral resembled that of a mid-front vowel; dorsal posture in the Spanish trill resembled that of a mid-back vowel. Tongue body articulation in Russian non-palatalized laterals resembled that of a mid-back vowel, and Russian non-palatalized trills were produced with a dorsal posture resembling that of a mid-central vowel.These results are consistent with the hypothesis that coronal liquid consonants consist of a consonant-like coronal component and an intrinsic vowel-like dorsal component (Delattre and Freeman, Linguistics 44: 29– 68, 1968; Sproat and Fujimura, Journal of Phonetics 21: 291–311, 1993). Liquid segments are modeled as recurrent stable constellations in which a tongue-tip gesture is coordinated with a tongue-body gesture (Browman and Goldstein, Gestural syllable position effects in American English, AIP Press, 1995). Differences between ‘clear’ and ‘pharyngealized’ liquids are attributed to differences in dorsal target locations. Rhotic allophony is argued to result from the interaction of articulatory and aerodynamic factors. Spanish liquid vocalization is modeled as lenition of tongue tip gestures, and Slavic liquid metathesis as a change in intergestural coupling relationships.

scholarly journals The influence of dialect in sound symbolic size perception

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 30
Author(s):  
Andrew Shibata
Keyword(s):  
American English ◽  
Sound Symbolism ◽  
Size Perception ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Object Size ◽  
Front Vowel ◽  
Reading Task ◽  
Back Vowel ◽  
Listening Task ◽  
Referent Object

Prior research on sound symbolism and referent object size establishes that words with front vowels are perceived to refer to smaller objects than do back vowels (Ohala 1997; Klink 2000). Some dialects of American English exhibit vowel movement along the front-back axis which may influence perceived object size. This study focuses on California English /u/-fronting (Hinton et al. 1987) and predicts that shifting from a standardly back vowel [u] to a more front vowel [ʉ] is paired with a shift from a large perceived object size to a smaller perceived object size. This paper describes two experiments in which participants either silently read (reading task) or listened (listening task) to stimulus words and rated perceived object size. California English speakers in the reading task experiment perceived words with /u/ to be smaller than did non-California English speakers. This result suggests that sound symbolic perception is sensitive to fine phonetic variability due to a person’s dialect.

Intraspeaker Priming across the New Zealand English Short Front Vowel Shift

2021 ◽  
pp. 002383092110530
Author(s):  
Dan Villarreal ◽  
Lynn Clark
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Corpus Linguistics ◽  
Repetition Effect ◽  
Front Vowel ◽  
Repetition Effects ◽  
Phonetic Variation ◽  
Syntactic Variation ◽  
Vowel Shift ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Linguistic Material

A growing body of research in psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics, and sociolinguistics shows that we have a strong tendency to repeat linguistic material that we have recently produced, seen, or heard. The present paper investigates whether priming effects manifest in continuous phonetic variation the way it has been reported in phonological, morphological, and syntactic variation. We analyzed nearly 60,000 tokens of vowels involved in the New Zealand English short front vowel shift (SFVS), a change in progress in which trap/dress move in the opposite direction to kit, from a topic-controlled corpus of monologues (166 speakers), to test for effects that are characteristic of priming phenomena: repetition, decay, and lexical boost. Our analysis found evidence for all three effects. Tokens that were relatively high and front tended to be followed by tokens that were also high and front; the repetition effect weakened with greater time between the prime and target; and the repetition effect was stronger if the prime and target belonged to (different tokens of) the same word. Contrary to our expectations, however, the cross-vowel effects suggest that the repetition effect responded not to the direction of vowel changes within the SFVS, but rather the peripherality of the tokens. We also found an interaction between priming behavior and gender, with stronger repetition effects among men than women. While these findings both indicate that priming manifests in continuous phonetic variation and provide further evidence that priming is among the factors providing structure to intraspeaker variation, they also challenge unitary accounts of priming phenomena.

scholarly journals Are Tims hot and Toms not?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Franziska Hartung
Keyword(s):  
Sound Symbolism ◽  
Vowel Quality ◽  
Front Vowel ◽  
Functional Feature ◽  
Physical Size ◽  
Gender Group ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Back Vowel ◽  
The Relationship

Sound symbolism – the idea that there are motivated links between the sound of a word and its meaning has been established to be an existing phenomenon across different languages. Especially size sound symbolism seems to be a functional feature in many languages meaning that different types of vowels in words are associated with different physical size. Words with front vowels (e.g. little, tiny) are more likely to be used to indicate small physical size whereas words with back vowels (e.g. humungous, huge) are more likely to indicate large physical size. Because physical size plays an important role in ratings of attractiveness, we tested whether vowels in first names can influence how attractive the bearer of the name is perceived. In our experiment, participants saw faces paired with popular first names and rated the attractiveness of the depicted person. Masculine names were paired with pictures of men and feminine names with pictures of women. The names either contained a front or back vowel in the accented syllable and were within gender group randomly paired with pictures. We found that female raters preferred faces paired with back vowel names while male raters preferred faces paired with front vowel names, showing that the rater's gender – far more than the gender of the depicted person – determined the relationship between vowel quality and perceived attractiveness of faces. Our results confirm the role of sound symbolism in perception of attractiveness.

scholarly journals English and Portuguese consonant clusters: contrasts and challenges

2020 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sandra Madureira
Keyword(s):  
American English ◽  
Learning Model ◽  
Brazilian Portuguese ◽  
Consonant Clusters ◽  
Front Vowel ◽  
Vowel Epenthesis ◽  
Speech Learning Model ◽  
Speech Learning

ABSTRACT Consonant clusters occur both in Portuguese and English. However, clusters are more productive in English than in Portuguese and there are sequences which are only found in English.This study focuses on the contrasts between American English and Brazilian Portuguese consonant clusters and on three strategies Brazilian learners tend to apply when producing them: adding the high front vowel (epenthesis) between the consonants in the clusters, discarding consonants, or introducing phonetic changes. The relevance of introducing English clusters to Brazilian learners of English is pointed out and discussed under the framework of the Speech Learning Model (SLM).

Variationist typology: Shared probabilistic constraints across (non-)null subject languages

Linguistics ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 57 (3) ◽  
pp. 653-692 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rena Torres Cacoullos ◽  
Catherine E. Travis
Keyword(s):  
Temporal Relationship ◽  
Human Subjects ◽  
Variable Structure ◽  
Initial Position ◽  
Probabilistic Constraints ◽  
Null Subject ◽  
Lexical Aspect ◽  
Variation Patterns ◽  
Cross Language ◽  
Key Parameter

Abstract A key parameter in received classifications of language types is the expression of pronominal subjects. Here we compare variation patterns in conversational data of English – considered a non-null-subject language – and Spanish – a well-studied null-subject language. English has a patently lower rate of expression (approximately 3% unexpressed 1sg and 3sg human subjects vs. 60% in Spanish). Despite the stark difference in rate of expression, the same probabilistic constraints are at work in the two languages. Contrary to popular belief, VP coordination is neither a discrete nor a distinguishing category of English. Instead, a shared constraint is linking with the preceding subject, a refinement of accessibility to include, alongside coreferentiality, measures of structural connectedness – both prosodic and syntactic. Other shared constraints on unexpressed subjects are coreferential subject priming (a tendency to repeat the form of the previous mention) and lexical aspect (reflecting the contribution of a temporal relationship to subject expression). Where the languages most differ is in the envelope of variation. In English, besides coreferential-subject verbs conjoined with a coordinating conjunction, unexpressed subjects are limited to prosodic initial-position in declarative main clauses, a restriction that is absent in Spanish. We propose that the locus of cross-language comparisons is the variable structure of each language, defined by the set of probabilistic constraints but also the delimitation of the variable context within which these are operative.

Cross-Cultural Reliability and Factor Structure of the Wilson-Patterson Conservatism Scale

1977 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 453-454 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. Wayne Hogan
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Factor Structure ◽  
Business School ◽  
American English ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
School Students ◽  
The Cross ◽  
Item Scores

Based on the responses of 273 university and business school students residing in New Orleans, Louisiana, the reliability and factor structure of the Wilson-Patterson Conservatism Scale as used with American, English, Netherlands, New Zealand, and Australian subjects were examined. Similar mean-item scores and factor structures across samples suggest the cross-cultural usefulness of the scale as a measure for conservatism.

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