PWorkshop Archives: Summer Term 2002

07 May 2002

Bob Ladd

This talk will briefly sketch the thesis I intend to present at LabPhon 8 in June, but it is not a dry run of the talk itself - I intend to do that at Ling. Circle in June. Instead, I want to go into a little more background on a couple of the empirial problems I've been thinking about in connection with the LabPhon talk, specifically (a) "partial similarity" (looking at different ways in which phones (or phonemes) can be related to each other), and (b) "quasi-contrast" (a sub-case of (a), actually, concentrating on the mid-vowels in Italian). The talk will be extremely preliminary and I hope that there will be as much discussion as actual presentation.

14 May 2002

Elinor Keane (Oxford University)

Recent advances in the study of stress and its phonetic manifestations have taken little account of the Dravidian languages. In the case of Tamil, very little experimental work has been conducted and no consistent phonetic correlates identified, nor has there even been a firm consensus on the location of stress at either the lexical or sentence level. This paper describes the application of acoustic analysis, which has produced the first experimental confirmation of phonetic differences associated with rhythmic prominence in Tamil. Measurements of vowel duration and quality were made for sets of sentences recorded during fieldwork in south India. Analysis of these data revealed statistically significant differences correlated with syllable position, strongly suggesting that lexical stress in Tamil is fixed on the initial syllable. Finally, some implications of these findings for timing in Tamil and also the function of rhythmic prominence in the language are explored.

04 Jun 2002

Jim Scobbie (QMUC)

A basic assumption of generative phonology, whether constraint-based or derivational, is that the grammar must generate all and only the members of a coherent and definable set of well-formed representations. This implies that two different speakers of the same language or dialect will have identical grammars despite their differing exposure during acquisition to phonetic, phonological and lexical experiences. In fact, given the sheer amount of language-specific detail which has to be mastered, it might be thought unlikely that speakers form identical mental representations of their shared language. The crucial question though is how trivial these differences are. Are they relevant just at a low level of idiolect --- responsible for a type of variation which can tell us nothing of broader cross-linguistic patterns? Or are they more significant, suggestive that our universal linguistic endowment should be approached as a flexible statistical problem-solving faculty rather than as a computational system with a definable list of universal rules and a definable set of target representations?

In order to approach this issue experimentally we have undertaken both experimental phonetic analysis and traditional phonological research. We have adopted an approach based on sociolinguistically-structured groups of subjects who can be expected to vary in their systemisation of the phonetic or phonological phenomena under consideration.

In previous LabPhon meetings, structured groups of subjects have been used to demonstrate socially-functioning, phrasal, non-lexically-contrastive aspects of phonetic competence by Docherty, Foulkes, Milroy and colleagues [1]. They have also been used by Scobbie, Stuart-Smith and colleagues [2] as a tool to disambiguate the social from the lexically contrastive functions of a family of phonetic features active in conveying a contrast.

The reason here for using a socially heterogenous subject pool is to model more closely the normal linguistic situation in which we live. Standard experimental phonetics and laboratory phonology tend to rely on subjects who are highly literate and who speak standard varieties, or similar. Such data will tend to support the assumption of a "coherent and well-defined" system, because standard linguistic varieties have a set of homogenising norms associated with them with which speakers comply. But such a well-defined situation is not applicable to many (or most?) speakers of English (to be specific), who master production systems which typically range from non-standard, local, vernacular varieties to something more like the standard, as well as the ability to handle yet further dialectal variants perceptually.

In this paper we will mainly adopt an approach based on phonetic analysis of data from a sociolinguistically-structured pool of subjects. We undertook a study of speech from 12 young adult speakers from the Shetland Isles, an insular community with significant numbers of incomer families. The speakers can be said to have been exposed to the same contrast system: specifically the English stop voicing contrast in word-initial position. They have not all, however, been exposed to just one phonetic system for cueing that contrast, insofar as it is possible to make this separation, and the various target systems are in competition at a phonetic level. The choice is between short-lag aspiration vs. long-lag aspiration and pre-voicing vs. short-lag aspiration.

All subjects were born and raised in the islands, but the family backgrounds of the speakers differed: the shet/shet group have parents who were themselves born and brought up in Shetland; the scot/shet group have parents from elsewhere in Scotland; the eng/shet group have parents from England. The latter two groups represent 2nd generation incomers, whose phonetic and phonological systems are based on exposure to incompatible and competing initial stop-voicning systems, that of their non-Shetlandic parents, (short-lag vs. long lag VOT) and that of the Shetlandic community (prevoicing vs. short-lag VOT).

We measured the VOT cue to post-pausal, word-initial stop voicing, based solely on wordlist data (1229 tokens). A number of distinct systems were observed. They display patterns of prevoicing, short lag aspiration and long lag aspiration.

A standard Shetland system of fully voiced vs. unaspirated stops is observed for three shet/shet subjects and one shet/eng subject.

The fourth shet/shet subject is on the boundary between aspirated and unaspirated /p t k/ and on average she has voiceless unaspirated /d g/.

One shet/eng subject has prevoiced /b d/ but voiceless unaspirated /g/. His /p t k/ are on the boundary between aspirated and unaspirated, probably falling into the latter category.

One shet/eng subject and three shet/scot subjects have standard English VOT.

One shet/scot subject and one shet/eng subject have strongly aspirated stops for /p t k/ and prevoiced stops for /b d g/, a system that is highly marked, but communicatively unambiguous in this community.

We will discuss these systems in more detail. Our results raise interesting questions for theories of the phonetics/phonology interface (and the issues mentioned above) as well as exemplifying the susceptibility of markedness in the face of functional factors.

References:

Docherty, G., P. Foulkes, J. Milroy, L. Milroy, & D. Walshaw (1997) Descriptive adequacy in phonology: a variationist perspective. Journal of Linguistics 33: 275-310

Scobbie, James M., Claire Timmins, Jane Stuart-Smith, Fiona Tweedie, Nigel Hewlett and Alice E. Turk (2000) Fieldwork in the urban jungle: an empirical phonological study of Glasgow English. 7th International Conference on Laboratory Phonology (Labphon VII), Nijmegen. June 29th - 1st July 2000.

11 Jun 2002

Fiona Gibbon (QMUC)

This talk will describe a study that used electropalatography to identify articulatory drift in alveolar stops (/t/ and /d/) produced by ten children with functional articulation and phonological disorders. Drift involves an abnormal change in place of articulation that occurs during stop closure. An index was used to measure drift, with higher values indicating greater drift. The results showed that drift was higher in children who produced undifferentiated gestures (articulations with increased tongue-palate contact). Drift is an important characteristic of articulation because it is believed to reflect impaired speech motor control. In addition, drift could explain some perceptually based speech errors that are frequently reported in functional disorders.

18 Jun 2002

Susana Cortes Pomacondor & Ninik Poedjianto

In this paper we are trying to find what is transferred from the L1 sound system to the production of L2 sounds. We ask whether L2 speakers 1) transfer their L1 phonemic inventory onto L2, and assume a one-to-one mapping from L2 phones to L2 allophones; 2) transfer their L1 phonemic inventories and the mapping from phones to allophones from L1; 3) transfer their L1 allophonic inventory onto the L2 phonemic inventory, and assume a one-to-one mapping; or 4) transfer well-formedness conditions on L1 output. This paper attempts to test these hypotheses by looking at the English speech of Catalan speakers. Catalan speakers of English are ideal subjects for this study because Catalan and English have different phoneme inventories and both languages also have different realisations of the same phones in identical contexts.

Voicing Contrast in Indonesian English: A VOT and Phonatory Study on Word-initial /p/ - /b/     (Ninik Poedjianto) [University of Glasgow]

The fact that non-native English speakers outnumber native ones has led `foreign accent’ to become one of some frequently discussed research areas in language acquisition. Despite a higher tendency among non-natives to learn English in a foreign language environment as in Indonesia, the majority of `foreign accent’ studies deal with a second language one. This study, therefore, hopes to contribute to the former as well as to the phonetic description of Indonesian English and Indonesian, which has been little explored.

This paper discusses the voicing contrast of Indonesian English word-initial /p/-/b/ produced by Surabaya Indonesian speakers, which is part of my on-going PhD thesis. The production of 15 male and 15 female English students from three different proficiency levels 10 per group in a private language school in Surabaya was analysed both qualitatively and quantitatively. Findings from an earlier study (Poedjianto, 2002) showed that VOT measurements from beginners did not indicate any voicing contrast in Indonesian English /p/-/b/, unlike the general case with English /p/-/b/. However, this paper hypothesizes that VOT will progress across proficiency levels. Given that phonation (i.e. stiff and slack voice) is mainly important in indicating the voicing contrast in Surabaya Indonesian, it is hypothesized that there will be some adjustment made to reduce slackness along with the increase of VOT in Indonesian English. Both features are investigated and discussed.

Reference:

Poedjianto, N. 2002. Production of word-initial /p/-/b/ in Indonesian English. A paper presented at the 2002 BAAP Colloquium, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 25-27 March 2002.