CASL
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://eresearch.qmu.ac.uk/handle/20.500.12289/22
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Item Articulatory Aspects of Approximants(Equinox Publishing, 2026) Lawson, Eleanor; Scobbie, James M.Item English (Scottish) speech development(Oxford University Press, 2026) Scobbie, James M.; Cleland, Joanne; Lawson, Eleanor; Schaeffler, Sonja; McLeod, SharynneScottish 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.Item 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 ChoThe 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/.