Sallyanne Palethorpe

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.

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.

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.

Vowel classification in children

Research into the developing vowel system has assumed greater importance in recent years with growing evidence for a more important theoretical role for vowels in child phonology. One limitation of acoustic studies in child speech has been the practical difficulties associated with formant-based analysis and the experiments reported in this paper compare the reliability of critical bands and formant frequencies as acoustic correlates of vowel identity in children. Gaussian classification of vowels in/CVd/Australian English words was carried out using data collected from 4-year-old children and male and female adults. The results show that the use of critical bands for the classification of vowels in children is a robust technique which requires less experimenter intervention in the analysis procedure than the use of formant frequencies, while achieving similar results. The ability to utilize an automatic methodology such as critical band analysis can provide a very powerful tool for large-scale studies in this area.

Cue enhancement by stimulus repetition: Natural and synthetic speech comparisons

This study investigates perceptual differences between natural and synthesized speech as measured by the effects of stimulus repetition on test item identification accuracy. The results show that identification accuracy is enhanced by repetition for natural speech but not for synthesis, suggesting that there are appreciable differences in their perceptual properties, at least inder the conditions of this experiment.

High Rising Tunes in Australian English: The Communicative Function of L* And H* Pitch Accent Onsets

This study was designed to establish the specific communicative function of both low (L*) and high (H*) pitch accent onsets with high rising tunes (HRTs), earlier established as a feature of Australian English. The data consisted of the dialogues of four female and four male adolescent speakers who were recorded while participating in the Map task. The discourse analysis involved the application of Pierrehumbert & Hirschbergs compositional theory of tune meaning. The study appears to support key aspects of Pierrehumbert & Hirschbergs theory: the results show overwhelmingly that the speakers used high (H*) pitch accents with new information and low (L*) pitch accents with information that was already part of the speaker and hearers mutual beliefs. The findings suggest that the individual tones in a HRT each contribute to the overall meaning of an intonation contour, and that a close examination of intonation features within a developing communication context is crucial to understanding intonational meaning.

Acoustic analysis of monophthong and diphthong production in acquired severe to profound hearing loss

The effect of diminished auditory feedback on monophthong and diphthong production was examined in postlingually deafened Australian-English speaking adults. The participants were 4 female and 3 male speakers with severe to profound hearing loss, who were compared to 11 age- and accent-matched normally hearing speakers. The test materials were 5 repetitions of hVd words containing 18 vowels. Acoustic measures that were studied included F1, F2, discrete cosine transform coefficients (DCTs), and vowel duration information. The durational analyses revealed increased total vowel durations with a maintenance of the tense/lax vowel distinctions in the deafened speakers. The deafened speakers preserved a differentiated vowel space, although there were some gender-specific differences seen. For example, there was a retraction of F2 in the front vowels for the female speakers that did not occur in the males. However, all deafened speakers showed a close correspondence between the monophthong and diphthong formant movements that did occur. Gaussian classification highlighted vowel confusions resulting from changes in the deafened vowel space. The results support the view that postlingually deafened speakers maintain reasonably good speech intelligibility, in part by employing production strategies designed to bolster auditory feedback.

Hiatus resolution and linking 'r' in Australian english

Hiatus occurs when the juxtaposition of syllables results in two separate vowels occurring alongside one another. Such vowel adjacency, both within words and across word boundaries, is phonologically undesirable in many languages but can be resolved using a range of strategies including consonant insertion. This paper examines linguistic and extralinguistic factors that best predict the likelihood of inserted linking ‘r’ across word boundaries in Australian English. Corpus data containing a set of 32 phrases produced in a sentence-reading task by 103 speakers were auditorily and acoustically analysed. Results reveal that linguistic variables of accentual context and local speaking rate take precedence over speaker-specific variables of age, gender and sociolect in the management of hiatus. We interpret this to be a reflection of the phonetic manifestation of boundary phenomena. The frequency of the phrase containing the linking ‘r’, the frequency of an individuals use of linking ‘r’, and the accentual status of the flanking vowels all affect the /ɹ/ strength (determined by F3), suggesting that a hybrid approach is warranted in modelling liaison. Age effects are present for certain prosodic contexts indicating change in progress for Australian English.

Phonetic archaeology and 50 years of change to Australian English

The work reported here explores the issue of Australian English accent broadness, past and present, through a diachronic acoustic analysis of the vowel /iː/, drawing on archival data collected by Mitchell and Delbridge in the late 1950s and early 1960s and more recent data from the Australian Voices project. Data from 168 female speakers from the Mitchell and Delbridge survey and 70 female speakers from the Australian Voices project were examined. All were from Sydneys North and North West and represented the Government, Catholic and Independent school systems. A number of acoustic measurements were employed to identify variation and change associated with this vowel extracted from a single word in a sentence reading task. In particular, we were interested in the degree of onglide, a feature of /iː/ that is pervasive in Australian English. We provide empirical evidence showing that the broadness continuum has contracted by demonstrating that variation in the degree of onglide for /iː/ has changed in interesting ways for girls from three different school systems.

A Preliminary acoustic phonetic examination of Lebanese Australian English

DeVilliers and DeVilliers (2000, 2005) propose that deaf and hearing children acquire a theory of mind (or the understanding that human behaviour is the product of psychological states like true and false beliefs) as a consequence of their linguistic mastery of a rule of syntax. Specifically, they argue that the syntactic rule for sentential complementation with verbs of speech (e.g., “say”) precedes syntactic mastery of complementation for cognition (e.g., “think”) and both of these developmentally precede and promote conceptual mastery of a theory of mind (ToM), as indexed via success on standard false belief tests. The present study examined this proposition in groups of primary-school-aged deaf children and hearing preschoolers who took false belief tests and a modified memory for complements test that included control questions. Guttman scaling techniques indicated no support either for the prediction that syntactic skill precedes ToM understanding or for the earlier emergence of complementation for “say” than for “think”. Methodological issues and implications for deaf childrens ToM development are discussed.DeVilliers and DeVilliers (2000, 2005) propose that deaf and hearing children acquire a theory of mind (or the understanding that human behaviour is the product of psychological states like true and false beliefs) as a consequence of their linguistic mastery of a rule of syntax. Specifically, they argue that the syntactic rule for sentential complementation with verbs of speech (e.g., “say”) precedes syntactic mastery of complementation for cognition (e.g., “think”) and both of these developmentally precede and promote conceptual mastery of a theory of mind (ToM), as indexed via success on standard false belief tests. The present study examined this proposition in groups of primary-school-aged deaf children and hearing preschoolers who took false belief tests and a modified memory for complements test that included control questions. Guttman scaling techniques indicated no support either for the prediction that syntactic skill precedes ToM understanding or for the earlier emergence of complementation for “say” than for “think”. Methodological issues and implications for deaf childrens ToM development are discussed.