Deborah Loakes

Individual Variation in the Frication of Voiceless Plosives in Australian English: A Study of Twins' Speech

This study is an acoustic–phonetic examination of variation in Australian English consonant production. Group and individual patterns in the rates of frication of the voiceless plosives /p t k/ in Australian English are investigated. Previous studies on voiceless plosive production in Australian English have focussed primarily on /t/, and these analyses have largely been auditory in nature. Further, whereas previous studies have focussed on describing sociophonetic variation within Australian English, this study investigates speaker-specific variation. An analysis of twin speech, produced by young adult male speakers from Melbourne, is presented. The speakers are three identical twin pairs and one non-identical twin pair. The reason for studying twins, and identical twins in particular, is to explore the degree of phonetic difference between pairs of individuals who, theoretically, are as anatomically similar as possible and whose educational levels and home lives have been relatively the same. The speakers were recorded separately, engaging in spontaneous conversation with the first author in two sessions each. All /p t k/ tokens were categorized as fricated or closed using acoustic waveforms and wideband spectrograms. While /t/ was rarely fricated by any speaker, /p/ and /k/ exhibited a wide range of variation in the proportions of tokens fricated, both between speakers, and within twin pairs. Further, each individuals proportions of /p/ and /k/ tokens fricated were relatively consistent across the two recording sessions. Implications of these findings for descriptions of Australian English and theories of speaker characteristics are discussed.

Developing Tests for the Assessment of Traditional Language Skill: A Case Study in an Indigenous Australian Community.

This article reports on the development and piloting of a vocabulary recognition test designed for Indigenous Australian children. The research is both application oriented and development oriented. The aims of the article are to determine how well the test is used as a test instrument and the extent to which children recognize vocabulary items in Walmajarri (a local Indigenous language still spoken mainly by the older generation). The test was developed in collaboration with one community and extended to three neighboring communities where the same Indigenous language is spoken. Childrens receptive knowledge of vocabulary items (nouns) in Walmajarri was tested, with 80 child participants across all communities. The usability of the test is discussed, as well as results of this language test, and recommendations are offered for future research in this area.

Creole Speakers and Standard Language Education

Speakers of creole languages experience educational disadvantage in schools that teach in the standard language of their region, but there remain many misconceptions about why this is the case and how best to facilitate academic improvement, despite research demonstrating that actively using creoles in the classroom leads to a range of positive outcomes for these students. This paper reviews how attitudes towards creoles influence their place in educational contexts, some of the challenges for research on creoles in education, approaches to teaching creole-speaking children with particular reference to bilingual programs, and the ramifications of standardized testing for creole-speaking students.

Child-caregiver interaction in two remote Indigenous Australian communities

This paper reports on a study in two remote multilingual Indigenous Australian communities: Yakanarra in the Kimberley region of Western Australia and Tennant Creek in the Barkly region of the Northern Territory. In both communities, processes of language shift are underway from a traditional language (Walmajarri and Warumungu, respectively) to a local creole variety (Fitzroy Valley Kriol and Wumpurrarni English, respectively). The study focuses on language input from primary caregivers to a group of preschool children, and on the childrens productive language. The study further highlights child-caregiver interactions as a site of importance in understanding the broader processes of language shift. We use longitudinal data from two time-points, approximately 2 years apart, to explore changes in adult input over time and developmental patterns in the childrens speech. At both time points, the local creole varieties are the preferred codes of communication for the dyads in this study, although there is some use of the traditional language in both communities. Results show that for measures of turn length (MLT), there are notable differences between the two communities for both the focus children and their caregivers. In Tennant Creek, children and caregivers use longer turns at Time 2, while in Yakanarra the picture is more variable. The two communities also show differing trends in terms of conversational load (MLT ratio). For measures of morphosyntactic complexity (MLU), children and caregivers in Tennant Creek use more complex utterances at Time 2, while caregivers in Yakanarra show less complexity in their language at that time point. The studys findings contribute to providing a more detailed picture of the multilingual practices at Yakanarra and Tennant Creek, with implications for understanding broader processes of language shift. They also elucidate how childrens language and linguistic input varies diachronically across time. As such, we contribute to understandings of normative language development for non-Western, non middle-class children in multilingual contexts.

Vowels in Wunambal, a Language of the North West Kimberley Region

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.

Enhancing the left edge: The phonetics of prestopped sonorants in Australian languages.

The consonant systems of Australian Aboriginal languages are very similar to one another but very different from those of most other languages of the world. They have unusually few contrasts in manner of articulation and an unusually large number of places of articulation. Previous research has shown that speakers appear to employ a number of strategies to preserve place of articulation distinctions, particularly in intervocalic (coda) consonants. One such strategy is that in vowel + nasal sequences speakers avoid lowering the velum until the latest possible instant, presumably to preserve spectral clarity at the VC boundary. This often results in a brief homorganic oral stop occurring before the nasal. Phonetically prestopped nasals occur in a large number of languages across Australia and have become distinctive phonemes in a number of languages in the center and south. Less well documented is the parallel phenomenon of prestopped laterals, which is taken to be the outcome of a similar coarticulation av...

Coarticulation and consonant cluster production in Iwaidja.

Articulatory analyzes of consonant cluster production have provided a rich source of information for modeling the production of speech over the years. It has been suggested that Australian indigenous languages show remarkable stability in heterorganic C1C2 sequences where C1 is coronal and C2 is noncoronal as in /nk/ sequences. In other words they show little or no anticipatory place of articulation assimilation. In this paper, the focus is on consonant cluster production in Iwaidja, an endangered Australian indigenous language spoken in the Northern Territory, Australia. Like most Australian languages, Iwaidja has a rich set of oral stop, lateral, and nasal place of articulation contrasts. Results of an acoustic phonetic and electropalatographic study show that assimilation is resisted in various ways in order to maintain place contrasts in certain sequences. Strategies include gestural delay and associated lengthening of initial consonants in C1C2 sequences. Nevertheless there is also clear evidence of ...