CASL
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://eresearch.qmu.ac.uk/handle/20.500.12289/22
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Item The social stratification of tongue shape for postvocalic /r/ in Scottish English(Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2011-04-20) Lawson, Eleanor; Scobbie, James M.; Stuart-Smith, Jane; ESRCThe sociolinguistic modelling of phonological variation and change is almost exclusively based on auditory and acoustic analyses of speech. One phenomenon which has proved elusive when considered in these ways is the variation in postvocalic /r/ in Scottish English. This study therefore shifts to speech production: we present a socioarticulatory study of variation of postvocalic /r/ in CVr words, using a socially-stratified ultrasound tongue imaging corpus of speech collected in eastern central Scotland in 2008. Our results show social stratification of /r/ at the articulatory level, with middle-class speakers using bunched articulations, while working-class speakers use greater proportions of tongue-tip and tongue-front raised variants. Unlike articulatory variation of /r/ in American English, the articulatory variants in our Scottish English corpus are both auditorily distinct from one another, and correlate with strong and weak ends of an auditory rhotic continuum, which also shows clear social stratification.Item The role of anterior lingual gesture delay in coda /r/ lenition: An ultrasound tongue imaging study(International Phonetic Association, 2015-08-15) Lawson, Eleanor; Scobbie, James M.; Stuart-Smith, JaneWe investigate the contribution that lingual gesture delay makes to lenition of postvocalic /r/. This study uses a socially-stratified, audio-ultrasound corpus of Scottish English containing recordings from two sociolects; one with postvocalic /r/ weakening and the other with strengthening. We quantify auditory strength of rhoticity and the timing of the anterior lingual gesture relative to the offset of voicing in CVr words: bar, bore, fur, or onset of a following consonant in CVrC words: farm, herb, burp, in order to show that there is a statistically significant correlation between weak rhoticity and a late articulatory gesture. Our ultrasound data also show that during the process of final consonant vocalization/deletion, underlying articulatory gestures may persist.