Roeland van Hout

An acoustic description of the vowels of northern and southern standard Dutch II: regional varieties.

An analysis is presented of regional variation patterns in the vowel system of Standard Dutch as spoken in the Netherlands (Northern Standard Dutch) and Flanders (Southern Standard Dutch). The speech material consisted of read monosyllabic utterances in a neutral consonantal context (i.e., /sVs/). The analyses were based on measurements of the duration and the frequencies of the first two formants of the vowel tokens. Recordings were made for 80 Dutch and 80 Flemish speakers, who were stratified for the social factors gender and region. These 160 speakers were distributed across four regions in the Netherlands and four regions in Flanders. Differences between regional varieties were found for duration, steady-state formant frequencies, and spectral change of formant frequencies. Variation patterns in the spectral characteristics of the long mid vowels /e o ø/ and the diphthongal vowels /ei oey bacwards c u/ were in accordance with a recent theory of pronunciation change in Standard Dutch. Finally, it was found that regional information was present in the steady-state formant frequency measurements of vowels produced by professional language users.

Watching Dutch change: A real time study of variation and change in standard Dutch pronunciation

This study investigates phonological variation and change in two varieties of standard Dutch: southern standard Dutch (spoken in Flanders, the northern part of Belgium) and northern standard Dutch (spoken in the Netherlands). A new source for studying language change in progress is introduced: archived recordings of radio broadcasts. The study covers the period from 1935 to 1993. Changes in progress are studied by a combination of insight and techniques from historical linguistics and sociolinguistics. The outcomes of analyzing separate linguistic variables are presented, but the focus of the analysis is on the presence of more general patterns of covariation within the set of linguistic variables and on the possibility of distinguishing (prototypical) temporal and community-based varieties of standard Dutch. The results reveal a pattern of divergence between the two varieties of standard Dutch. The southern variety remained more or less stable between 1935 and 1993. Northern standard Dutch, however, changed substantially.

Will Dutch become Flemish? Autonomous developments in Belgian Dutch

Abstract In this paper a series of studies of standard Dutch pronunciation in Belgium and the Netherlands is presented. The research is based on two speech corpora: a diachronic corpus of radio speech (1935–1995) and a synchronic corpus of Belgian and Netherlandic standard Dutch from different regions at the turn of the millennium. It is shown that two divergent pronunciation standards have been developing, but it is argued that the divergence will not create two autonomous standard languages. As such, Dutch is not different from its two closest pluricentric neighbors, German and English.

Temporality in learner discourse : What temporal adverbials can and what they cannot express

SummaryTypically, learner varieties do not, or only at a late stage, develop verbal inflection. Hence, they lack the best-studied means to express time, tense and aspect. What they do develop, are temporal adverbials of various sort. This raises the question whether temporal adverbials can compensate for this apparent lack. In a detailed investigation of how Moroccan and Turkish learners acquire Dutch in everyday communication, it is shown that the answer to this question is largely positive — with some restrictions, though. It may well be that precisely these restrictions of their communicative power are an important incentive to further acquisition — though it means the risk of abandoning a relatively efficient and stable learner variety.

Accentedness Ratings and Phonological Variables as Measures of Variation in Pronunciation

Verbally neutral, spontaneous speech samples were selected from interviews with 16 younger and 16 older males (mean ages 17 and 69 years, respectively) varying in socio-economic status (SES). All informants were native of Nijmegen, a city in the mideast of the Netherlands. The speech samples were rated with respect to the degree of accentedness and the pronunciation of six phonological variables with variants typical for the Nijmegen dialect. A factor analysis based on the correlations among the phonological variables yielded two factors, the first with high loadings of the four vowels, the second with a high loading of one of the two consonants, the /v/. The other consonant, the /z/, did not contribute to either factor. There was a strong correlation between the factor-1 scores on the one hand and accentedness and SES on the other. The factor-2 scores correlated with age. Some methodological and theoretical implications of the findings are discussed.

The Effect of Background Noise on the Word Activation Process in Nonnative Spoken-Word Recognition.

This article investigates 2 questions: (1) does the presence of background noise lead to a differential increase in the number of simultaneously activated candidate words in native and nonnative listening? And (2) do individual differences in listeners’ cognitive and linguistic abilities explain the differential effect of background noise on (non-)native speech recognition? English and Dutch students participated in an English word recognition experiment, in which either a word’s onset or offset was masked by noise. The native listeners outperformed the nonnative listeners in all listening conditions. Importantly, however, the effect of noise on the multiple activation process was found to be remarkably similar in native and nonnative listening. The presence of noise increased the set of candidate words considered for recognition in both native and nonnative listening. The results indicate that the observed performance differences between the English and Dutch listeners should not be primarily attributed to a differential effect of noise, but rather to the difference between native and nonnative listening. Additional analyses showed that word-initial information was found to be more important than word-final information during spoken-word recognition. When word-initial information was no longer reliably available word recognition accuracy dropped and word frequency information could no longer be used suggesting that word frequency information is strongly tied to the onset of words and the earliest moments of lexical access. Proficiency and inhibition ability were found to influence nonnative spoken-word recognition in noise, with a higher proficiency in the nonnative language and worse inhibition ability leading to improved recognition performance.

Regional variation in vowels and vowel systems: normalization and optimization

We made an acoustical description of regional variation patterns in the vowel system of Dutch spoken in the Netherlands and Flanders. The speech material consisted of read monosyllabic utterances in a neutral consonantal context, representing the vowels of Dutch. A discriminant analysis applied on the raw measurements to classify each speaker into one of the eight regions involved (socio‐geographic variation) gave a correct regional classification for 72.0% of the 160 speakers. When normalization procedures were applied, the percentages of proper classification increase to 82.5%. Several questions have to be answered though. Which normalization procedure is the best one and why, and how can we be sure that specific parts of sociophonetic variation are not distorted by the normalization procedure? We will present additional materials collected on the same set of speakers in reading aloud a strictly controlled list of words containing all Dutch vowels in different consonantal contexts. Another question is h...