Browsing by Person "Lawson, Eleanor"

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A common co-ordinate system for mid-sagittal articulatory measurement
(2011-06) Scobbie, James M.; Lawson, Eleanor; Cowen, Steve; Cleland, Joanne; Wrench, Alan A.
A standard practice in EMA articulatory measurement is to set the origin of the measurement space near the boundary of the upper incisors and gum, on a standard reference coil. A conventional horizontal dimension is defined as being parallel to the speaker's unique bite (occlusal) plane. We propose that this convention be extended to other instrumentation, with a focus on how it can be achieved for ultrasound tongue imaging (UTI) in particular, using a disposable and hygienic vacuum-formed bite plate of known size. A bite plane trace, like a palate trace, provides a consistent reference to allow images to be rotated and translated in case the probe is in a new location relative to a speaker's cranial space. The bite plane also allows speakers with differently shaped palates to be overlaid, and for ultrasound data to share a coordinate space with EMA. We illustrate the proposal using a sample of six speakers. The average bite plane slope could be used to retrospectively rotate ultrasound data that lacks bite-plane measurement
A mimicry study of adaptation towards socially-salient tongue shape variants
(Penn Graduate Linguistics Society, 2014-10-01) Lawson, Eleanor; Stuart-Smith, Jane; Scobbie, James M.
A single case study of articulatory adaptation during acoustic mimicry
(2011-08) Lawson, Eleanor; Scobbie, James M.; Stuart-Smith, Jane; ESRC
The distribution of fine-grained phonetic variation can be observed in the speech of members of well-defined social groups. It is evident that such variation must somehow be able to propagate through a speech community from speaker to hearer. However, technological barriers have meant that close and direct study of the articulatory links of this speaker-hearer chain has not, to date, been possible. We present the results of a single-case study using an ultrasound-based method to investigate temporal and configurational lingual adaptation during mimicry. Our study focuses on allophonic variants of postvocalic /r/ found in speech from Central Scotland. Our results show that our informant was able to adjust tongue gesture timing towards that of the stimulus, but did not alter tongue configuration.
A socio-articulatory study of Scottish rhoticity
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) Lawson, Eleanor; Scobbie, James M.; Stuart-Smith, Jane; Lawson, Robert
Increasing attention is being paid in sociolinguistics to how fine phonetic variation is exploited by speakers to construct and index social identity (Hay and Drager 2007). To date, most sociophonetic work on consonants has made use of acoustic analysis to reveal unexpectedly subtle variation which is nonetheless socially indexical (e.g. Docherty and Foulkes 1999). However, some aspects of speech production are not readily recoverable even with a fine-grained acoustic analysis. New articulatory analysis techniques, such as ultrasound tongue imaging (UTI), allow researchers to push the boundaries further, identifying seemingly covert aspects of speech articulation which pattern with indexical factors with remarkable consistency. One such case is postvocalic /r/ variation in Central Scotland.
Articulatory insights into language variation and change : preliminary findings from an ultrasound study of derhoticization in Scottish English
(Penn Linguistics Club, 2008) Lawson, Eleanor; Stuart-Smith, Jane; Scobbie, James M.
Scottish English is often cited as a rhotic dialect of English. However, in the 70s and 80s, researchers noticed that postvocalic /r/ was in attrition in Glasgow (Macafee, 1983) and Edinburgh (Romaine, 1978; Johnston and Speitel 1983). Recent research (Stuart-Smith, 2003) confirms that postvocalic /r/ as a canonical phonetically rhotic consonant is being lost in working-class Glaswegian speech. However, auditory and acoustic analysis revealed that the situation was more complicated than simple /r/ vs. zero variation. The derhoticized quality of /r/ seemed to vary socially; in particular male working class speakers often produced intermediate sounds that were difficult to identify. It is clear that although auditory and acoustic analysis are useful, they can only hint at what is going on in the vocal tract. A direct articulatory study is thus motivated. Instrumental phonetic studies that examine the vocal tract during the production of sustained rhotic consonants and in laboratory-based studies of American English /r/ have identified a complex relationship between articulation and acoustics, including articulatory differences with minimal acoustic consequences (starting with Delattre and Freeman, 1968). In other words, different gestural configurations can be used to generate a canonically rhotic consonant. A pilot study (Scobbie and Stuart-Smith, 2006) using Ultrasound Tongue Imaging (UTI) with a Scottish vernacular speaker revealed something rather different: the occurrence of a strong articulatory retroflex tongue motion, which generated little or no rhotic acoustic consequences because it was timed to occur after phonation had ceased, before pause. This tongue motion was found in a speaker who was weakly rhotic. Thus we may have a situation in which acoustic differences with a sociolinguistic function have, in some prosodic contexts, imperceptible articulatory differences in tongue position, though timing will vary. The situation of language variation and change in Scotland means that an articulatory/acoustic study is likely to give very different results to similar studies of rhotic speakers in the USA (Mielke, Twist, and Archangeli, 2006), and be particularly relevant to understanding social variation. Ultrasound is non-invasive and portable and therefore has great potential as an instrumental method for studying aspects of socially stratified variation: articulatory data can be physically collected in every-day social settings. However the technique requires refinement for effective use in recording locations outside the laboratory (e.g. in school, at home), and the potential impact of using the equipment on speech is not known. Gick (2002) suggest methods for fieldwork, but we are not aware of any study which attempts to quantify the effects of the technique on vernacular speakers. Ultrasound is non-invasive and portable and therefore has great potential as an instrumental method for studying aspects of socially stratified variation: articulatory data can be physically collected in every-day social settings. However the technique requires refinement for effective use in recording locations outside the laboratory (e.g. in school, at home), and the potential impact of using the equipment on speech is not known. Gick (2002) suggest methods for fieldwork, but we are not aware of any study which attempts to quantify the effects of the technique on vernacular speakers.
Back to front: a socially-stratified ultrasound tongue imaging study of Scottish English /u/
(2012-12) Scobbie, James M.; Lawson, Eleanor; Stuart-Smith, Jane; ESRC
Bunched /r/ promotes vowel merger to schwar: An Ultrasound Tongue Imaging study of Scottish sociophonetic variation
(Elsevier, 2013-05-01) Lawson, Eleanor; Scobbie, James M.; Stuart-Smith, Jane; ESRC
For a century, phoneticians have noted a vowel merger in middle-class Scottish English, in the neutralisation of prerhotic checked vowels //, //, // to a central vowel, e.g. fir, fur, fern [f_], [f_] [f_n], or [f_], [f_], [f_n]. Working-class speakers often neutralise two of these checked vowels to a low back [] vowel, fir, fur, both pronounced as [f_] or as [f]. The middle-class merger is often assumed to be an adaptation towards the UK's socially prestigious R.P. phonological system in which there is a long-standing three-way non-rhotic merger, to []. However, we suggest a system-internal cause, that coarticulation with the postvocalic /r/ may play a role in the contemporary Scottish vowel merger. Indeed, strongly rhotic middle-class Scottish speakers have recently been found to produce postvocalic approximant /r/ using a markedly different tongue configuration from working-class Scottish speakers, who also tend to derhoticise /r/. We present the results of an ultrasound tongue imaging investigation into the differing coarticulatory effects of bunched and tongue-front raised /r/ variants on preceding vowels. We compare tongue shapes from two static points during rhotic syllable rimes. Phonetically, it appears that the bunched /r/ used by middle-class speakers exerts a stronger global coarticulatory force over preceding vowel tongue configurations than tongue-front raised /r/ does. This also results in a monophthongal rhotic target for what historically had been three distinct checked vowels. Phonologically, our view is that middle-class speakers of Scottish English have reduced the V+/r/ sequence to one segment; either a rhoticised vowel /_/ or a syllabic rhotic /r/.
Changing Sounds in a Changing City: An Acoustic Phonetic Investigation of Real-Time Change over a Century of Glaswegian
(Cambridge University Press, 2017-07) Stuart-Smith, Jane; José, Brian; Rathcke, Tamara; MacDonald, Rachel; Lawson, Eleanor; Montgomery, Chris; Moore, Emma
A comparison of acoustic and articulatory parameters for the GOOSE vowel across British Isles Englishes
(Acoustical Society of America, 2019-12-19) Lawson, Eleanor; Stuart-Smith, Jane; Rodger, Lydia
This study quantifies vocalic variation that cannot be measured from the acoustic signal alone and develops methods of standardisation and measurement of articulatory parameters for vowels. Articulatory-acoustic variation in the GOOSE vowel was measured across three regional accents of the British Isles, using a total of eighteen speakers from the Republic of Ireland, Scotland and England, recorded with synchronous ultrasound tongue imaging, lip camera and audio. Single co-temporal measures were taken of tongue-body height and backness, lip protrusion, F1 and F2. After normalisation, mixed-effects modelling identified statistically-significant variation for region; tongue-body position was significantly higher and fronter for Irish and English speakers. Region was also significant for lip-protrusion measures, with Scottish speakers showing significantly smaller degrees of protrusion than English speakers. However, Region was only significant for acoustic height and not for frontness.Correlational analyses of all measures showed: a significant positive correlation between tongue-body height and acoustic height; a negative correlation between lip-protrusion and acoustic frontness; but no correlation between tongue-body frontness and acoustic frontness. Effectively, two distinct regional production strategies were found to result in similar normalised acoustic frontness measures for GOOSE: Scottish tongue-body positions were backer and lips less protruded, while English and Irish speakers had fronter tongue-body positions, but more protruded lips.
Derhoticisation in Scottish English: a sociophonetic journey
(John Benjamins, 2014-06-12) Stuart-Smith, Jane; Lawson, Eleanor; Scobbie, James M.; Calmai, S.; Celata, C.
Sociophonetic variation presents us with challenges and opportunities. This paper focuses on an area of phonetic variation which is particularly rich and informative about the social exploitation of the complexities of the acoustics-articulatory relationship - namely fine-grained variation and change in Scottish English coda /r/. Scottish English is typically thought to be 'rhotic' (e.g. Wells 1982), such that postvocalic /r/ in words such as car, card, and better are realized with some kind of articulated rhotic consonant (approximant, tap, and exceptionally a trill). This paper presents historical and more recent sociophonetic data from the Central Belt of Scotland (from Edinburgh to Glasgow), which show auditory/impressionistic, acoustic, and articulatory evidence of derhoticisation (e.g. Stuart-Smith 2003; Stuart-Smith et al 2007; Lawson et al 2011a; Lawson et al 2011). Derhoticisation is especially evident in working-class speakers, whilst middle-class speakers are developing auditorily 'stronger' rhotics and merging vowels before /r/. We consider the geographical and social distribution of the rhotic-derhotic continuum in these varieties and the linguistic and sociolinguistic factors involved, and the evidence to date that exists from speech perception and social evaluation of speech. We conclude by considering how sociophonological detail and abstraction are encoded in mental representations (cf e.g. Johnson 2006).
Dynamic Dialects: an articulatory web resource for the study of accents [website]
(University of Glasgow, 2015-04-01) Lawson, Eleanor; Stuart-Smith, Jane; Scobbie, James M.; Nakai, Satsuki; Beavan, David; Edmonds, Fiona; Edmonds, Iain; Turk, Alice; Timmins, Claire; Beck, Janet M.; Esling, John; Leplatre, Gregory; Cowen, Steve; Barras, Will; Durham, Mercedes
Dynamic Dialects (www.dynamicdialects.ac.uk) is an accent database, containing an articulatory video-based corpus of speech samples from world-wide accents of English. Videos in this corpus contain synchronised audio, ultrasound-tongue-imaging video and video of the moving lips. We are continuing to augment this resource. Dynamic Dialects is the product of a collaboration between researchers at the University of Glasgow, Queen Margaret University Edinburgh, University College London and Napier University, Edinburgh. For modelled International Phonetic Association speech samples produced by trained phoneticians, please go to the sister site http://www.SeeingSpeech.ac.uk
ECB08 (original)
(2008) Scobbie, James M.; Lawson, Eleanor
Eastern Central Belt ultrasound tongue imaging corpus. Created in 2008. 15 informants 8 females 7 males Edinburgh and Livingston
The effects of syllable and sentential position on the timing of lingual gestures in /l/ and /r/
(International Phonetic Association, 2019-08-10) Lawson, Eleanor; Stuart-Smith, Jane
This paper is an ultrasound-based articulatory study of the impact of syllable-position and utterance position on gesture timing in liquid consonants in American, Irish and Scottish English. Mixed effects modelling was used to analyse variation in the relative timing of the anterior and posterior lingual gestures for /l/ and /r/ in syllable-onset and coda position and in utterance-initial, medial and final position. Results showed that the component lingual gestures for /l/ and /r/ are coordinated differently in onsets and codas, across the three varieties studied; the anterior lingual gesture tends to precede the posterior gesture in syllable-onset liquids, while this gesture order is reversed for syllable-coda liquids. For /l/, but not /r/, being in utterance-initial and final position results in a significantly increased temporal distance between the two lingual gestures. For coda /r/, prerhotic vowels were found to have a significant impact on the relative timing of lingual gestures.
The effects of syllable and utterance position on tongue shape and gestural magnitude in /l/ and /r/
(International Phonetic Association, 2019-08-10) Lawson, Eleanor; Leplatre, Gregory; Stuart-Smith, Jane; Scobbie, James M.
This paper is an ultrasound-based articulatory study of the impact of syllable-position and utterance position on tongue shape and tongue-gesture magnitude in liquid consonants in American, Irish and Scottish English. Mixed effects modelling was used to analyse variation in normalised tongue-gesture magnitude for /r/ and /l/ in syllable-onset and coda position and in utterance-initial, medial and final position. Variation between onset and coda mean midsagittal tongue surfaces was also quantified using normalised root-mean-square distances, and patterns of articulatory onset-coda allophony were identified. Despite the fact that some speakers in all varieties used tip-up /r/ in syllable-onset position and bunched /r/ in coda position, RMS distance results show greater degrees of similarity between onset and coda /r/ than between onset and coda /l/. Gesture magnitude was significantly reduced for both /l/ and /r/ in coda position. Utterance position had a significant effect on /l/ only.
English (Scottish) speech development
(Oxford University Press, 2024) Scobbie, James M.; Cleland, Joanne; Lawson, Eleanor; Schaeffler, Sonja; McLeod, Sharynne
Scottish English is primarily spoken in Scotland, U.K. It is a national quasi-standard variety of English with a range of social and geographical variants. It can be characterized as a highly distinctive accent (or accent group) of English, mainly due to its relationship to Scots. Its strongly distinct character may be more phonetic, prosodic and lexical than strictly phonemic and phonological, so for practical reasons it can be assumed that its inventory and consonant phonotactics overlap sufficiently with other varieties for many “British English” clinical resources to be applicable. Scottish English is, however, rhotic in its prestige varieties, which makes it markedly different from non-rhotic Southern Standard British English and other non-rhotic varieties. There are few specific studies of children’s acquisition of Scottish English, though Scottish children are often incorporated in larger studies in the U.K. Research on Scottish English has focused on social variation, speech production, and remediation techniques augmented with real time visual biofeedback, involving children with speech sound disorders and cleft palate. Commonly-used speech assessments and interventions have not been developed specifically for this variety of English.
Lenition and fortition of /r/ in utterance-final position, an ultrasound tongue imaging study of lingual gesture timing in spontaneous speech
(Elsevier, 2021-04-16) Lawson, Eleanor; Stuart-Smith, Jane; Taehong Cho
The most fundamental division in English dialects is the rhotic/non-rhotic division. The mechanisms of historical /r/-loss sound change are not well understood, but studying a contemporary /r/-loss sound change in a rhotic variety of English can provide new insights. We know that /r/ weakening in contemporary Scottish English is a gesture-timing based phenomenon and that it is socially indexical, but we have no phonetic explanation for the predominance of weak /r/ variants in utterance-final position. Using a socially-stratified conversational ultrasound tongue imaging speech corpus, this study investigates the effects of boundary context, along with other linguistic and social factors such as syllable stress, following-consonant place and social class, on lingual gesture timing in /r/ and strength of rhoticity. Mixed-effects modelling identified that utterance-final context conditions greater anterior lingual gesture delay in /r/ and weaker-sounding /r/s, but only in working-class speech. Middle-class speech shows no anterior lingual gesture delay for /r/ in utterance-final position and /r/ is audibly strengthened in this position. It is unclear whether this divergence is due to variation in underlying tongue shape for /r/ in these social-class communities, or whether utterance-final position provides a key location for the performance of social class using salient variants of /r/.
Liquids
(Routledge, 2010-10) Lawson, Eleanor; Stuart-Smith, Jane; Scobbie, James M.; Yaeger-Dror, Malcah; Maclagan, Margaret; Di Paolo, Marianna; Yaeger-Dror, Malcah
Looking variation and change in the mouth: developing the sociolinguistic potential of Ultrasound Tongue Imaging.
(Queen Margaret University, 2008-06) Scobbie, James M.; Stuart-Smith, Jane; Lawson, Eleanor; ESRC
The central goal of this project is to meet a pressing need: to enable the investigation of how speakers from anywhere on a socio-dialectal spectrum physically articulate speech.
Onset vs. Coda Asymmetry in the Articulation of English /r/
(International Phonetic Association, 2015-08-15) Scobbie, James M.; Lawson, Eleanor; Nakai, Satsuki; Cleland, Joanne; Stuart-Smith, Jane
We describe an asymmetric categorical pattern of onset-coda allophony for English /r/, the post-alveolar rhotic approximant, drawing on published and unpublished information on over 100 child, teenage and adult speakers from prior studies. Around two thirds of the speakers exhibited allophonic variation that was subtle: onset and coda /r/ were typically both bunched (BB), or both tip-raised (RR), with minor within speaker differences. The other third had a more radical categorical allophonic pattern, using both R and B types. Such variable speakers had R onsets and B codas (RB): but the opposite pattern of allophony (BR) was extremely rare. This raises questions as to whether the asymmetry is accidental or motivated by models of syllable structure phonetic implementation.
Scotland - Glasgow and the Central Belt
(Cambridge University Press, 2017-05) Stuart-Smith, Jane; Lawson, Eleanor; Hickey, Raymond