How stable are patterns of covariation across time?

New Zealand English (NZE) is characterized by a series of sound changes in the vowel system. Research on NZE over the past 50 years has traced the emergence and progression of sound changes such as the short front vowel shift and the merging of near and square. This historical research is based primarily on analysis of recordings from the 1940s and informal commentary taken from written records. This paper introduces a new major source for historical NZE data. We report on a recently rediscovered doctoral thesis by George Edward Thompson. This work, published in 1920, includes a full phonetic description of early NZE alongside abundant sociolinguistic commentary. We provide a translation of the phonetic transcription in this work and discuss how this primary source challenges our current understanding of how NZE developed.

This study acoustically analyses the vowel space of adult New Zealand English speakers from a predominantly Pasifika suburb in Auckland (Papatoetoe). These speakers (n = 13) are compared to two equivalent groups from non-Pasifika Auckland suburbs, Mount Roskill (n = 14) and Titirangi (n = 6). All participants are New Zealand English speakers aged 16–25. There were equal numbers of male and female participants. For the acoustic analysis vowels with sentence stress were identified and extracted and formant values were calculated at the vowel target. This study looks at over 8000 monophthongs and 4000 diphthongs. The study found minimal differences between speakers from different suburbs, but all groups had notable differences from the traditional New Zealand English (NZE) vowel space. These differences align with previous comments regarding the vowels of Pasifika New Zealand English. The paper concludes by contemplating what these results say about Pasifika New Zealand English and New Zealand English in Auckland.

It is well known that vowels are shorter before voiceless consonants than voiced ones in English, as in many other languages. Research has shown that the ratio of vowel durations in voiced and voiceless contexts in English is in the range of 0.6~0.8. However, little work has been done as to whether the ratio of vowel durations varies depending on English variety. In the production experiment in this paper, seven speakers from three varieties of English, New Zealand, British, and American English, read 30 pairs of (C)VC monosyllabic words which differ in coda voicing (e.g. beat-bead). Vowel height, phonemic vowel length, and consonant manner were varied as well. As expected, vowel-shortening effects were found in all varieties: vowels were shorter before voiceless than before voiced codas. Overall vowel duration was the longest in American English and the shortest in New Zealand (NZ) English. In particular, vowel duration before voiceless codas is the shortest in New Zealand English, indicating the most radical degree of shortening in this variety. As a result, the ratio of vowel durations in varying voicing contexts is the lowest in NZ English, while American and British English do not show a significant difference each other. In addition, consonant closure duration was examined. Whereas NZ speakers show the shortest vowel duration before a voiceless coda, their voiceless consonants have the longest closure duration, which suggest an inverse relationship between vowel duration and closure duration.

New Zealand English first emerged at the beginning of the 19th century as a result of the dialect contact of British (51%), Scottish (27.3%) and Irish (22%) migrants (Hay and Gordon 2008:6). This variety has subsequently developed into an autonomous and legitimised national variety and enjoys a distinct socio-political status, recognition and codification. In fact, a number of dictionaries of New Zealand English have been published1 and the variety is routinely used as the official medium on TV, radio and other media. This however, has not always been the case, as for long only British standard norms were deemed suitable for media broadcasting. While there is some work already on lay commentary about New Zealand English (see for example Gordon 1983, 1994; Hundt 1998), there is much more to be done especially concerning more recent periods of the history of this variety and the ideologies underlying its development and legitimisation. Consequently, the current project aims at investigating the metalinguistic discourses during the period of transition from a British norm to a New Zealand norm in the media context, this will be done by focusing on debates about language in light of the advent of radio and television. The main purpose of this investigation is thus to examine the (language) ideologies that have shaped and underlain these discourses (e.g. discussions about the appropriateness of New Zealand English vis a vis external, British models of language) and their related practices in these media (e.g. broadcasting norms). The sociolinguistic and pragmatic effects of these ideologies will also be taken into account. Furthermore, a comparison will be carried out, at a later stage in the project, between New Zealand English and a more problematic and less legitimised variety: Estuary English. Despite plenty of evidence of media and other public discourses on Estuary English, in fact, there has been very little metalinguistic analysis of this evidence, nor examinations of the underlying ideologies in these discourses. The comparison will seek to discover whether similar themes emerge in the ideologies played out in publish discourses about these varieties, themes which serve to legitimise one variety, whilst denying such legitimacy to the other.

While New Zealand English (NZE) is a highly researched variety of English due to its variable monophthongal system, one community in New Zealand remains greatly under-researched — the Gloriavale Christian Community. This community gives us a laboratory insight into how new dialect formation (NDF) and isolation interplay in the formation of a new accent. Furthermore, we investigate how this accent may differ by gender as the community exhibits high levels of sex segregation. We investigate vocalic variation of eight NZE monophthongs in 24 Gloriavale speakers and compare their findings to a less isolated New Zealand community. We find that Gloriavale vowels show greater rates of change compared to the less isolated community, with most of these changes following the majority settler dialect (i.e. NZE). When we look at gender differences, the Gloriavale women exhibit monotonic sound change towards a broad NZE dialect with innovative GOOSE and NURSE vowels, while the Gloriavale men exhibit age-graded variation. We discuss the former findings considering the NDF and isolation literature, while the gender findings require understanding of Communities of Practice research and general principles of sound change.

6-[18F]fluoro-L-dopa (FDOPA) is a common presynaptic dopaminergic tracer used in examinations by positron emission tomography (PET) for patients with Parkinson's disease (PD). The distinct metabolic covariance pattern in the uptake of [18F]fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) can also be used to investigate PD pathology. Although the two tracers are widely used in PD research and clinical assessment, no thorough comparative studies of the tracers have been made. In this study, 25 PD patients were examined with FDOPA and FDG to investigate relationships and clinical correlates of metabolic and monoaminergic function in the Parkinsonian brain. A VOI (volume-of-interest) analysis was achieved by 3D spatial normalisation and fixed VOI-sets. The hemisphere ipsi- and contralateral to the predominant symptoms of PD was identified in each data set, and data across subjects were related using that laterality, rather than body side. Regional covariance patterns for FDOPA and FDG were derived from principal component analysis (PCA). The results demonstrated hemispheric asymmetries and sex-differences in the striatal FDOPA uptake, which were not seen with FDG. In addition, the PCA analysis identified a positive relationship between a major component in FDOPA uptake (associated with the striatal uptake) and an FDG component, which had positive loadings in the thalamus and the cerebellum. The subject scores for these components correlated positively, and both had a negative association with the clinical severity of the disease. The specific extrastriatal FDG covariance pattern contained the thalamus and the cerebellum, components of the previously reported PD related pattern, but not the striatum. The network correlated with both the severity of clinical symptoms of PD and the severity of nigrostriatal dopaminergic hypofunction. The results indicate that FDG PET, when combined with multivariate network analysis at group-level, can be used as an indicator of PD severity.

Elizabeth Gordon, Lyle Campbell, Jennifer Hay, Margaret Maclagan, Andrea Sudbury & Peter Trudgill, New Zealand English: Its history and evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. xix, 370. Hb $85.00. Between 1946 and 1948, Radio New Zealand established a Mobile Unit that visited many towns throughout the country, seeking out people who were longtime residents of small towns in order to record their oral histories. In 1986 Elizabeth Gordon was told of these archived recordings. The uniqueness of this data corpus is that the speakers, born between 1851 and 1904, were all participants in the formation of a new dialect, New Zealand English (NZE). It is unlikely that other data sets will be found in which tape recording technology and a first generation of speakers come together. English had arrived in 1840 with the original colonizers, who were mainly English, Scottish, and Irish. The story gets complicated by the arrival of many English-speaking immigrants from Australia, descendants from a penal colony founded in 1788, which had formed its own new dialect earlier with input from English, Scottish, and Irish settlers. Moreover, settlers often spent time first in Australia and then moved to New Zealand, and there was considerable contact between Australia and New Zealand from the start. It is within this historical setting and with this database that the Origins of New Zealand English (ONZE) project researchers set out to describe early NZE in order to examine its origins.

BackgroundFlorzolotau (APN‐1607) tau‐PET has shown distinct patterns of binding in patients with AD and 4‐repeat tauopathies. We aimed to establish disease‐specific tau covariance patterns in AD and PSP/CBS and validate them as user‐independent quantitative biomarkers for reference‐region‐free evaluation of tau‐PET in an independent clinical cohort.MethodWe analyzed Florzolotau PET data from four different cohorts. The derivation dataset included 30 Aß‐ healthy controls (HC) and 30 patients each with Aß+ AD and PSP with Richardson’s syndrome (PSP‐RS). The validation dataset included 44, 51, 6, 15, and 17 patients with AD, PSP/CBS, MSA, LBD, and FTD, respectively. First, we applied scaled sub‐profile modelling principal components analysis to the derivation dataset to define the AD‐ and PSP‐RS‐related covariance patterns. Second, the topographic profile rating algorithm was applied to each scan to calculate AD‐ and PSP‐RS‐related pattern scores.ResultThe AD‐ and PSP‐RS‐related patterns are described in Figures 1 and 2. In the derivation dataset, the AD‐ and PSP‐RS‐scores showed strong increases compared to HC (both p<0.001,AUC‐ROC = 0.994 and 0.898, respectively). AD‐scores showed a significant negative association with age (r = ‐0.66,p<0.001) and MMSE (r = ‐0.64,p<0.001) in AD, while PSP‐RS‐scores correlated with the PSP rating scale (r = 0.43,p = 0.018) in PSP‐RS. In the validation dataset (Figure 3), AD‐scores were highest in AD (p<0.001 vs. all other, AUC‐ROC[AD vs. all other] = 0.946) and were negatively associated with age and MMSE in AD (r = ‐0.62,p<0.001 and r = ‐0.49,p = 0.002, respectively). PSP‐RS‐scores were highest in the PSP/CBS (p<0.001 vs. all other [at least p<0.05 vs. each group], AUC‐ROC[PSP/CBS vs. all other] = 0.734), though also relatively increased in FTD and MSA. UPDRS‐III scores (off‐state) were available in 23 PSP/CBS patients and significantly associated with PSP‐RS‐scores (r = 0.60,p = 0.002).ConclusionModelling with principal components analysis allows for reference‐region‐free quantification of tau imaging data by constructing disease‐specific covariance patterns. When applied to Florzolotau, AD‐ and PSP‐RS‐related patterns showed high discrimination power in both the derivation and the clinically heterogeneous validation cohorts. PSP‐RS‐related pattern expression in FTD and MSA may be related to PSP pathology and known striatal off‐target binding, respectively. Strong association with respective disease severity scores further advocates for use of AD‐ and PSP‐RS‐related patterns as potential quantitative biomarkers of tau pathology.

Because New Zealand English (NZE) developed sufficiently recently, sound recordings are available from the first generation of New Zealand born speakers. Some of these recordings are held in the Mobile Unit (MU) archive in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Canterbury and have been analysed by the Origins of New Zealand English Project (ONZE). This paper shows how the speakers from the MU archive have enabled the story of New Zealand English to be told considerably more accurately than would have been possible had only written sources of information been available. The sorts of infor mation about NZE that can be gleaned from written sources is discussed as well as the historical context in which NZE developed. Key results from the analyses of the MU archive are presented together with an indication of the way in which this archive has enabled factors that affected the development of NZE to be identified.

Tracking the New Zealand English NEAR/SQUARE merger using functional principal components analysis

Understanding the brain changes underlying cognitive dysfunction is a key priority in multiple sclerosis (MS) to improve monitoring and treatment of this debilitating symptom. Functional connectivity network changes are associated with cognitive dysfunction, but it is less well understood how changes in normal appearing white matter relate to cognitive symptoms. If white matter tracts have network structure it would be expected that tracts within a network share susceptibility to MS pathology. In the present study, we used a tractometry approach to explore patterns of variance in white matter metrics across white matter (WM) tracts, and assessed how such patterns relate to neuropsychological test performance across cognitive domains. A sample of 102 relapsing-remitting MS patients and 27 healthy controls underwent MRI and neuropsychological testing. Tractography was performed on diffusion MRI data to extract 40 WM tracts and microstructural measures were extracted from each tract. Principal component analysis (PCA) was used to decompose metrics from all tracts to assess the presence of any co-variance structure among the tracts. Similarly, PCA was applied to cognitive test scores to identify the main cognitive domains. Finally, we assessed the ability of tract co-variance patterns to predict test performance across cognitive domains. We found that a single co-variance pattern which captured microstructure across all tracts explained the most variance (65% variance explained) and that there was little evidence for separate, smaller network patterns of pathology. Variance in this pattern was explained by effects related to lesions, but one main co-variance pattern persisted after this effect was regressed out. This main WM tract co-variance pattern contributed to explaining a modest degree of variance in one of our four cognitive domains in MS. These findings highlight the need to investigate the relationship between the normal appearing white matter and cognitive impairment further and on a more granular level, to improve the understanding of the network structure of the brain in MS.

ABSTRACTIn studying language change, variationists are, naturally perhaps, more interested in the new, innovative form than in the old conservative one, and because of the actuation problem, investigations of changes in progress very rarely are able to shed light on the change in its very earliest stages. In this article, I suggest that we should perhaps pay more attention than we have at present to the origins of the change (in addition to its route and destination) and the nature of the conservative form if we are to chart ongoing changes in an accurate way. Here, I highlight an example of a feature of New Zealand English (NZE) (realizations of themouthdiphthong with front mid-open onsets) that has, until recently, been assumed to have resulted from a change of the Southern Shift-kind—a raising and fronting to [εʊ~εƏ]—but which, as I demonstrate using contemporary and past dialectological, as well as sociodemographic evidence, did not undergo this change in this way. Indeed, the supposedly conservative [aʊ] form has barely been used at all as a conversational vernacular variant in NZE. I argue here that the present-day NZE realization is far more likely to be the outcome of a process of dialect leveling operating on the mixture of forms brought to New Zealand by British and Irish migrants in the 19th century. The moral of the story is that if we think we observe a change in progress from A to B, we need to provide evidence not just of the existence of B, but also of the prior existence of A.

-Morphometric variation in samples of common mynas from 11 localities in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and Hawaii was analyzed with principal component analysis. We attempt to avoid two shortcomings in many previous applications of principal component analysis in morphometrics by analyzing separately variation within and among populations, and by applying the jackknife procedure to reduce subjectivity in interpretation of the principal components. Within populations, only principal component I appears to have a stable orientation and this orientation is common to all localities. Component II may be a simple vector, differing across localities, but similarity in the second and third eigenvalues warns that the associated components could be largely arbitrary. The variance along component I does differ across localities. Among populations, again only the first component displays convincing stability, although component II may be a stable but extremely simple vector. Both within and among populations, component I appears to be a general factor representing size and size-related shape variation. The apparently simple patterns of covariation displayed by the introduced populations may be attributable to bottlenecks in small founding populations and the short time since the introductions were made. Future studies should incorporate some form of testing to confirm putative patterns of character covariation, and doing so probably will require sample sizes much larger than has been the custom. [Skeletal morphometrics; principal component analysis; jackknife; population variation; mynas.] A general justification for a morphometric approach to evolutionary studies arises from the common belief that morphology is a primary and direct means by which organisms interact with their environment; variation in size and shape can have physiological and mechanical consequences (Gould, 1966; Alexander, 1968, 1971; McMahon, 1973, 1975; Pedley, 1977). Support for this belief tends to come from large-scale phenomena. Morphological differences among species, for example, are related convincingly to functional differences (e.g., Lack, 1947; Bock, 1970; Liem, 1973; Abbott et al., 1977). It then is assumed generally that such correspondences apply continuously through finer scales of variation. Thus, we arrive at an assumption of morphometricians that measured differences among individuals have functional consequences to the organisms involved, though empirical support for this assumption is rather sparse (but see Grant et al. [1976] and references therein; Herrera, 1978). By further extension, morphological differences among geographically separated populations are believed not only to affect function but also to correlate with environmental differences, leading to generalizations such as the ecogeographic rules. Finally, it is assumed that both withinand amongpopulation variation is adaptive and, therefore, has been crafted by natural selection. Correlation of these two sources of variation is a central prediction of the synthetic theory of evolution (Sokal, 1978). Our goal herein is to learn how skeletal variation is organized within populations of birds, and whether the pattern of this variation is involved in among-population differentiation. Additionally, we wish to describe the pattern of among-population variation and to determine its relationship to within-population structure. Principal component analysis is a common analytical approach here, but many applications have incorporated two methodological

This study presents an acoustic comparison between New Zealand English (NZE) and Australian English (AE) citation‐form monophthongs and diphthongs. Formant frequencies were calculated and the data were labelled for vowel target position. Four main kinds of analysis were carried out: F1/F2 formant plots of monophthongs, onglides in vowels exemplified by HEED and WHO'D, formant trajectories of rising diphthongs, and formant trajectories of falling diphthongs. Consistent with other studies, we find the major differences in the NZE and AE vowel spaces are the centralizing and lowering of NZE HID and HOOD, and the raising of the NZE front and high vowels. The major difference in the diphthongs is the HERE/HAIR merger occurring in NZE but not AE. Contrary to other studies we find both HEED and WHO'D in NZE have long onglides and that the extent of these onglides is similar to those in AE. Proposals are included for a modification to the transcription system of NZE.

NEW ZEALAND ENGLISH is one of the most closely studied national varieties of English outside of the USA and UK, and a source of significance for the dialect differentiation and historical evolution of English. Most of the work has been done in the relatively short period of about 15 years compared with the longer time frame of studies in British and American English. One reason for this is that New Zealand English has, from its beginning, benefited from significant co-operative and collaborative activity among New Zealand linguists.