Kirsty McDougall

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.

Profiling fluency: an analysis of individual variation in disfluencies in adult males

This document is the Accepted Manuscript version of the following article: Kirsty McDougall, and Martin Duckworth, ‘Profiling fluency: An analysis of individual variation in disfluencies in adult males’, Speech Communication, Vol. 95:16-27, December 2017, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.specom.2017.10.001. Under embargo. Embargo end date: 10 April 2019. This manuscript version is made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License CC BY NC-ND 4.0, (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ ), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.

Contents Vol. 72, 2015

Sonia Frota, Lisbon (Portugal) Wentao Gu, Nanjing (China) Rachel Hayes-Harb, Salt Lake City, Utah (USA) Sarah Hawkins, Cambridge (United Kingdom) Allard Jongman, Lawrence, Kans. (USA) Ghada Khattab, Newcastle upon Tyne (United Kingdom) Ineke Mennen, Graz (Austria) Richard Ogden, York (United Kingdom) Marianne Pouplier, Munich (Germany) Rachel Walker, Los Angeles, Calif. (USA) Patrick C.M. Wong, Hong Kong (China)