Jonathan Harrington

358,534 nonwords: The ARC Nonword Database

The authors present a model of the phonotactic and orthographic constraints of Australian and Standard Southern British English monosyllables. This model is used as the basis for a web-based psycholinguistic resource, the ARC Nonword Database, which contains 358,534 monosyllabic nonwords—48,534 pseudohomophones and 310,000 non-pseudohomophonic nonwords. Items can be selected from the ARC Nonword Database on the basis of a wide variety of properties known or suspected to be of theoretical importance for the investigation of reading.

Multi-level annotation in the Emu speech database management system

Researchers in various fields, from acoustic phonetics to child language development, rely on digitised collections of spoken language data as raw material for research. Access to this data had, in the past, been provided in an ad-hoc manner with labelling standards and software tools developed to serve only one or two projects. A few attempts have been made at providing generalised access to speech corpora but none of these have gained widespread popularity. The Emu system, described here, is a general purpose speech database management system which supports complex multi-level annotations. Emu can read a number of popular label and data file formats and supports overlaying additional annotation with inter-token relations on existing time-aligned label files. Emu provides a graphical labelling tool which can be extended to provide special purpose displays. The software is easily extended via the Tcl/Tk scripting language which can be used, for example, to manipulate annotations and build graphical tools for database creation. This paper discusses the design of the Emu system, giving a detailed description of the annotation structures that it supports. It is argued that these structures are sufficiently general to allow Emu to read potentially any time-aligned linguistic annotation.

An acoustic phonetic study of broad, general, and cultivated Australian English vowels*

Abstract The focus of this paper is an acoustic analysis of citation‐form monophthongs and diphthongs produced by a large number of male and female talkers whose accents vary from broad to general to cultivated and who were recorded as part of the Australian National Database of Spoken Language (ANDOSL). Following an initial auditory categorisation of the talkers’ accents, the formants frequencies were calculated and the data were labelled for vowel target positions. Four main kinds of analysis were carried out: of monophthongs, of onglides in /i u/ vowels, of the trajectories in rising diphthongs, and of the trajectories of falling diphthongs. Consistently with earlier studies, the results show that the broad/general/cultivated accent differences are confined mostly to the rising diphthongs and to ongliding in /i/. The production of the falling diphthongs was found to be phonetically the most variable of all vowel categories. Some proposals are included for a modification to the transcription system of A...

Acoustic evidence for dynamic formant trajectories in Australian English vowels.

The extent to which it is necessary to model the dynamic behavior of vowel formants to enable vowel separation has been the subject of debate in recent years. To investigate this issue, a study has been made on the vowels of 132 Australian English speakers (male and female). The degree of vowel separation from the formant values at the target was contrasted to that from modeling the formant contour with discrete cosine transform coefficients. The findings are that, although it is necessary to model the formant contour to separate out the diphthongs, the formant values at the target, plus vowel duration are sufficient to separate out the monophthongs. However, further analysis revealed that there are formant contour differences which benefit the within-class separation of the tense/lax monophthong pairs.

Does the Queen speak the Queen's English?

The pronunciation of all languages changes subtly over time, mainly owing to the younger members of the community. What is unknown is whether older members unwittingly adapt their accent towards community changes. Here we analyse vowel sounds from the annual Christmas messages broadcast by HRH Queen Elizabeth II during the period between the 1950s and 1980s. Our analysis reveals that the Queens pronunciation of some vowels has been influenced by the standard southern-British accent of the 1980s which is more typically associated with speakers who are younger and lower in the social hierarchy.

An acoustic analysis of 'happy-tensing' in the Queen's Christmas broadcasts

Abstract This paper presents a longitudinal analysis of some vowels from the annual Christmas broadcasts produced by Queen Elizabeth II over a 50-year period in order to investigate whether adults adapt to sound changes taking place in the community. The sound change that was analyzed in this paper, which is sometimes known as happY-tensing, concerns the tensing of the final vowel in words like ‘happy’ in British English Received Pronunciation over the course of the last 50 years. In the first part of the study, schwa vowels in Christmas broadcasts separated by 40–50 years were analyzed in order to exclude as far as possible any long-term acoustic effects due to vocal tract maturation. The results of this analysis show a large decrease in both the fundamental and F1, F2, and F4 from earlier to later broadcasts. It is then shown that the Queens 1950s happY vowel is less tense than in a 1980s corpus of four female speakers of Standard Southern British. A subsequent comparison between the 1950s and 1990s Christmas broadcast happY vowels shows a small change towards the tenser position. It is argued that the vowels exemplified by KIT and happY have undergone phonetic raising in RP, with the latter also having fronted. The Queen has participated in the first of these changes and marginally in the second.

Monophthongal vowel changes in Received Pronunciation: an acoustic analysis of the Queen's Christmas broadcasts

In this paper we analyse the extent to which an adults vowel space is affected by vowel changes to the community using a database of nine Christmas broadcasts made by Queen Elizabeth II spanning three time periods (the 1950s; the late 1960s/early 70s; the 1980s). An analysis of the monophthongal formant space showed that the first formant frequency was generally higher for open vowels, and lower for mid-high vowels in the 1960s and 1980s data than in the 1950s data, which we interpret as an expansion of phonetic height from earlier to later years. The second formant frequency showed a more modest compression in later, compared with earlier years: in general, front vowels had a decreased F2 in later years, while F2 of the back vowels was unchanged except for [u] which had a higher F2 in the 1960s and 1980s data. We also show that the majority of these F1 and F2 changes were in the direction of the vowel positions of 1980s Standard Southern British speakers reported in Deterding (1997). Our general conclusion is that there is evidence of accent change within the same individual over time and that the Queens vowels in the Christmas broadcasts have shifted in the direction of a more mainstream form of Received Pronunciation.

Coarticulation and the accented/unaccented distinction: evidence from jaw movement data

Both coproduction and the more recent task dynamic models of speech production have advanced an explanation for certain kinds of vowel shortening in terms of coarticulatory overlap between neighbouring speech sounds. In this study, the extent to which coarticulatory overlap between opening and closing jaw movement gestures accompanies the accented/unaccented vowel distinction is considered. The authors begin by quantifying the salient differences between truncation, which is caused by a close phasing of articulatory gestures, and linear rescaling of jaw movements. In both truncation and linear rescaling, the duration and amplitude of movement decrease, and the peak velocities remain the same: the main differences occur in the resulting shape of the waveform between the temporal location of the peak velocities in the opening and closing gestures. Three parameters that encode these shape differences are then applied to the speech movements produced by three subjects. This study shows that the accented/unaccented differences are more appropriately modelled as a consequence of truncation, than linear rescaling. {~) 1995 Academic Press Limited

The Australian National Database of Spoken Language

The Australian National Database of Spoken Language is a collaborative project involving four active institutions and the explicit support of a wide cross-section of the speech science and technology community in Australia. The novel collaborative structure and procedures for selecting speakers, the material recorded, the recording environment, and subsequent annotation and descriptive procedures are described. A summary of the overall goals and the current status of the project are given.<<ETX>>

Reading aloud begins when the computation of phonology is complete.

Naming latency experiments in which monosyllabic items are read aloud are based on the assumption that the vocal response is not initiated until the phonology of the entire syllable has been computed. Recently, this assumption has been challenged by A. H. Kawamoto, C. T. Kello, R. Jones, and K. Bame (1998), who argued instead that the reading-aloud response begins as soon as the initial phoneme is computed. This view would be refuted by evidence of anticipatory coarticulation effects on the initial phoneme due to the nature of the following vowel in the speeded reading-aloud task. The authors provide such evidence.