Jane Stuart-Smith

Comprehension of familiar and unfamiliar native accents under adverse listening conditions.

This study aimed to determine the relative processing cost associated with comprehension of an unfamiliar native accent under adverse listening conditions. Two sentence verification experiments were conducted in which listeners heard sentences at various signal-to-noise ratios. In Experiment 1, these sentences were spoken in a familiar or an unfamiliar native accent or in two familiar native accents. In Experiment 2, they were spoken in a familiar or unfamiliar native accent or in a nonnative accent. The results indicated that the differences between the native accents influenced the speed of language processing under adverse listening conditions and that this processing speed was modulated by the relative familiarity of the listener with the native accent. Furthermore, the results showed that the processing cost associated with the nonnative accent was larger than for the unfamiliar native accent.

Aspects of non-native pronunciation in a case of altered accent following stroke (foreign accent syndrome)

Foreign accent syndrome (FAS) refers to a disorder that involves foreign sounding speech, usually following stroke. This paper presents a case study of an English patient allegedly speaking with a Scottish English accent after right-hemisphere stroke. The results of detailed impressionistic and acoustic analyses are reported, based on a direct comparison of the patients pre-stroke and post-stroke speech samples. The emphasis is on a comparison of the typical features of Scottish English and phonetic features actually found in the patients post-stroke speech. The respective roles of prosodic and segmental features in the post-stroke speech sample are also discussed. Rather untypically, prosodic features seem to be affected to a much lesser extent than segmental phonetic features in the patients post-stroke speech. They are, therefore, less likely to contribute to the perception of a foreign accent.

Bunched /r/ promotes vowel merger to schwar: an ultrasound tongue imaging study of Scottish sociophonetic variation

For a century, phoneticians have noted a vowel merger in middle-class Scottish English, in the neutralisation of prerhotic checked vowels /ɪ/, /ʌ/, /ɛ/ to a central vowel, e.g. fir, fur, fern [fəɹ], [fəɹ] [fəɹn], or [fɚ], [fɚ], [fɚn]. Working-class speakers often neutralise two of these checked vowels to a low back [ʌ] vowel, fir, fur, both pronounced as [fʌɹ] or as [fʌʕ]. The middle-class merger is often assumed to be an adaptation towards the UK’s socially prestigious R.P. phonological system in which there is a long-standing three-way non-rhotic merger, to [ɜː]. However, we suggest a system-internal cause, that coarticulation with the postvocalic /r/ may play a role in the contemporary Scottish vowel merger. Indeed, strongly rhotic middle-class Scottish speakers have recently been found to produce postvocalic approximant /r/ using a markedly different tongue configuration from working-class Scottish speakers, who also tend to derhoticise /r/. We present the results of an ultrasound tongue imaging investigation into the differing coarticulatory effects of bunched and tongue-front raised /r/ variants on preceding vowels. We compare tongue shapes from two static points during rhotic syllable rimes. Phonetically, it appears that the bunched /r/ used by middle-class speakers exerts a stronger global coarticulatory force over preceding vowel tongue configurations than tongue-front raised /r/ does. This also results in a monophthongal rhotic target for what historically had been three distinct checked vowels. Phonologically, our view is that middle-class speakers of Scottish English have reduced the V+/r/ sequence to one segment; either a rhoticised vowel /ɚ/ or a syllabic rhotic /r/.

Exploring Bilingual Children's Perceptions of Being Bilingual and Biliterate: implications for educational provision

Abstract Within the framework of constructing learning, this paper explores the feelings of bilingual children towards developing two languages, two literacies and belonging to two communities in the environment of the education system, which in England is insensitive towards bilingual learners in its implementation of a monolingual and monoliterate curriculum. This paper presents the approaches and procedures employed to investigate young bilingual childrens constructs of their own identity and about being bilingual and becoming biliterate. Importantly, these constructs are expbred through both the childrens languages which has not been done in previous studies. Our findings show that bilingual children express their constructs of bilingualism, literacy and identity differently in both languages. Throughout the paper, we indicate the educational implications of this study for the policy and practice of the monolingual and monoliterate curriculum in England for bilingual childrens identities languages ...

Pre-aspiration and post-aspiration in Scottish Gaelic stop consonants

This paper aims to describe pre-aspirated and post-aspirated stops in an endangered language, Scottish Gaelic. Our small-scale study investigates several acoustic parameters of Scottish Gaelic stop consonants designed to measure the duration and noisiness of aspiration of the stop in its immediate phonetic context. Our study expands on previous phonetic descriptions of phonemic (pre)aspiration in three ways: firstly, we provide a more complete durational description of Scottish Gaelic than previous work in the literature; secondly, we apply a new measure, band-pass filtered zero crossing rate (Gordeeva & Scobbie 2010), in order to examine the noisiness of aspiration in addition to durational characteristics. The results from this measure are presented in tandem with durational results in order to assess its usefulness for future research. Thirdly, we consider the possibility of change in the Scottish Gaelic stop system by examining data from older and younger speakers. Results suggest that band-pass filtered zero crossing rate is a useful tool and should be considered in future research on aspiration. Also, durational and zero crossing results indicate that younger speakers have shorter and less noisy pre-aspiration than older speakers. We discuss these results as a possible sound change in progress.

The private life of stops: VOT in a real-time corpus of spontaneous Glaswegian

Abstract While voice onset time (VOT) is known to be sensitive to a range of phonetic and linguistic factors, much less is known about VOT in spontaneous speech, since most studies consider stops in single words, in sentences, and/or in read speech. Scottish English is typically said to show less aspirated voiceless stops than other varieties of English, but there is also variation, ranging from unaspirated stops in vernacular speakers to more aspirated stops in Scottish Standard English; change in the vernacular has also been suggested. This paper presents results from a study which used a fast, semi-automated procedure for analyzing positive VOT, and applied it to stressed syllable-initial stops from a real- and apparent-time corpus of naturally-occurring spontaneous Glaswegian vernacular speech. We confirm significant effects on VOT for place of articulation and local speaking rate, and trends for vowel height and lexical frequency. With respect to time, our results are not consistent with previous work reporting generally shorter VOT in elderly speakers, since our results from models which control for local speech rate show lengthening over real-time in the elderly speakers in our sample. Overall, our findings suggest that VOT in both voiceless and voiced stops is lengthening over the course of the twentieth century in this variety of Scottish English. They also support observations from other studies, both from Scotland and beyond, indicating that gradient shifts along the VOT continuum reflect subtle sociolinguistic control.

Developing Assessment Procedures for Phonological Awareness for use with Panjabi-English Bilingual Children

The links between phonological processing and literacy development have mainly been investigated in monolingual, English-speaking children and most tasks to assess phonological awareness have been devised in English. Increasing interest in phonological processing in children who speak languages other than English has helped lead to there cognition that phonological awareness is to a certain extent language-specific and dependent on the phonology of the language of assessment. Thus the development of tasks to measure phonological awareness must be sensitive to the phonology of the language concerned. This paper discusses the development of a battery of tasks which were used to assess phonological processing skills in Panjabi-English bilingual children in west Birmingham, U.K. The work is unusual among previous studies on phonological awareness in bilinguals in that we developed tasks to assess the children in both of their languages. Our results support the notion that at least some tasks of phonological awareness may be language-specific. Moreover we find that the results of phonological tasks for a particular language can be dependent on the task design and content, which in turn are constrained by the phonology of that language.

Investigating Literacy and Pre‐literacy Skills in Panjabi/English Schoolchildren

The acquisition of literacy in bilingual children is, as yet, a relatively under‐researched field, but one of crucial importance to all involved in education. In this paper we present interim results from a study which investigates the literacy and pre‐literacy skills, in particular phonological awareness skills, of a group of Panjabi/ English schoolchildren. We give an initial picture of the childrens phonological awareness skills in both languages and then make a preliminary attempt to identify links between ability in particular aspects of phonological awareness across both languages and English literacy. Our results indicate that assessment of pre‐literacy skills in bilingual children is useful only if carried out in both of the childrens languages.

A Socio-Articulatory Study of Scottish Rhoticity

Increasing attention is being paid in sociolinguistics to how fine phonetic variation is exploited by speakers to construct and index social identity (Hay and Drager 2007). To date, most sociophonetic work on consonants has made use of acoustic analysis to reveal unexpectedly subtle variation which is nonetheless socially indexical (e.g. Docherty and Foulkes 1999). However, some aspects of speech production are not readily recoverable even with a fine-grained acoustic analysis. New articulatory analysis techniques, such as ultrasound tongue imaging (UTI), allow researchers to push the boundaries further, identifying seemingly covert aspects of speech articulation which pattern with indexical factors with remarkable consistency. One such case is postvocalic /r/ variation in Central Scotland.

Multivariate Classification Methods for Lexical and Phonological Dissimilarities and Their Application to the Uto-Aztecan Family

We present some methodological guidelines for analyzing linguistic dissimilarity matrices, in particular graph-theoretic procedures and multivariate methods. We discuss the usefulness and limitations of phonological data besides lexical data as the basis of linguistic classification from data analysis procedures.