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Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://eresearch.qmu.ac.uk/handle/20.500.12289/22
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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/.Item 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.