Australian English Vowels Research Articles

Ladz in the Hood: Features of Pasifika English in Drill Rappers from Western Sydney

Despite well-established Pasifika communities in Australia, there has been no examination of the English spoken by members of these communities in the sociolinguistic literature. Yet, research shows that Pasifika English may exhibit key differences from local ‘mainstream’ varieties. In this paper, we present a case study of members of a drill rap group with Pasifika heritage to examine whether Pasifika English features are evident in their speech. We first analyze their monophthong productions and compare these to those of mainstream Australian English speakers. We also analyze their dental fricative realizations to examine whether there is evidence of th-stopping and dh-stopping, commonly described as markers of Pasifika English. Finally, we investigate whether their speech is more syllable-timed than mainstream Australian English. The results show that these speakers produce monophthongs generally consistent with mainstream Australian English vowels, despite some small differences. We also show consistent th-fronting and dh-stopping in their speech, which serves as a marker of their Pasifika heritage. We find a tendency towards more syllable-timed speech; however, this occurs to a lesser extent than has been reported for other Pasifika varieties of English. The results suggest that these speakers index their Pasifika identities by employing indicators/markers of Pasifika English that diverge from mainstream Australian English.

Variability in cross-language and cross-dialect perception. How Irish and Chinese migrants process Australian English vowels.

We investigate how three adult groups- experienced L2 English listeners; experienced D2 (second dialect) listeners; and native L1/D1 listeners- categorise Australian English (AusE) lax front vowels /ɪ e æ/ in /hVt/, /hVl/ and /mVl/ environments in a forced-choice categorisation task of synthesised continua. In study 1, AusE listeners show predictable categorisations, with an effect of coarticulation raising the vowel in perception for nasal onset stimuli, and a following lateral lowering the vowel in perception. In study 2, Irish (D2) and Chinese listeners (L2) have different categorisations than AusE listeners, likely guided by their D1/L1. Coarticulation influences the D1/D2 groups in similar ways, but results in more difficulty and less agreement for the Chinese. We also investigate the role of extralinguistic factors. For the Chinese listeners, higher proficiency in English does not correlate with more Australian-like categorisation behaviour. However, having fewer Chinese in their social network results in more Australian-like categorisation for some stimuli. These findings lend partial support to the role of experience and exposure in L2/D2 contexts, whereby categorisation is likely still driven by native categories, with increased exposure leading to better mapping, but not to a restructuring of underlying phonetic categories.

Processing of English Coda Laterals in L2 Listeners: An Eye-Tracking Study.

This study explores speech processing of English coda laterals (dark L's) in second language (L2) listeners whose native language does not permit laterals at syllable coda positions. We tested L2 listeners' (native Mandarin) perception of coda laterals following three Australian English vowels differing in phonological backness, including /iː/, /ʉː/, and /oː/, which represent a front vowel, and central vowel, and a back vowel, respectively. L2 listeners first completed an AX task which tested their ability to discriminate between /iː/-/iːl/, /ʉː/-/ʉːl/, and /oː/-/oːl/, and then they completed an identification task with eye-tracking which tested their ability to distinguish vowel-lateral sequences and bare vowel categories using explicit phonological-orthographical labels. The results show that vowel backness plays a key role in L2 listeners' perceptual accuracy of English coda laterals, whereas the eye-tracking and identification data suggest some paradigmatic differences between the two tasks. Mandarin listeners show excellent discrimination and identification of coda laterals following a front vowel and poor performance following a back vowel, whereas the central vowel has led to intermediate patterns.

Real-time imaging of vocal tract configuration in Australian english vowel production

Dynamic phonetic properties of Australian English vowels have been well described in acoustic (Cox, 2006; Elvin et al., 2016) and articulographic studies (Ratko et al., 2023), but the global configuration of the vocal tract during Australian English vowel production has not previously been examined. Midsagittal configuration of the upper airway during production of Australian English vowels was tracked using real-time magnetic resonance imaging (Kennerley et al., 2022) on a 3T scanner (Siemens Magnetom Prisma) using a 64-channel head/neck receiver array coil. Speech audio was simultaneously recorded in-scanner at 16 kHz using a ceramic noise-canceling microphone (Opto-acoustics FOMRI-III). 3D configuration of the vocal tract during sustained productions of the same monophthongs was captured using volumetric imaging of the upper airway at a resolution of 2mm × 2 mm × 2 mm. These data offer new details on configuration of the entire vocal tract and the relationship between articulatory and acoustic targets during production of Australian English vowels.

Australian English over Time: Using Sociolinguistic Analysis to Inform Dialect Coaching

ABSTRACT Depictions of Australian English in theater and film by non-Australian performers are often met with negative public reactions by Australian audiences. This partially stems from misconceptions about Australian vowel pronunciations (e.g., that mate and might are homophones); however, there is also a general lack of awareness about how Australian English has changed over time. Research in dialect coaching has long argued that dialect practitioners and learners must have sociolinguistic awareness of the phonetic reality of the dialect being represented. This paper is a resource to assist in the development of such awareness. Research methods from sociolinguistics and phonetics are applied to provide a detailed description of Australian English vowels as evidenced in a large, longitudinal corpus of spontaneous speech data. The corpus captures the speech of 95 Anglo-Celtic Australians in Australia’s largest city, Sydney, and includes recordings made at two points in time (1970s and 2010s) with speakers born between 1914 and 1999. The empirical description of vowel productions over time presented here provides a guide for dialect coaches and performers alike for application in their work with Australian English.

Resilience of English vowel perception across regional accent variation

In two categorization experiments using phonotactically legal nonce words, we tested Australian English listeners’ perception of all vowels in their own accent as well as in four less familiar regional varieties of English which differ in how their vowel realizations diverge from Australian English: London, Yorkshire, Newcastle (UK), and New Zealand. Results of Experiment 1 indicated that amongst the vowel differences described in sociophonetic studies and attested in our stimulus materials, only a small subset caused greater perceptual difficulty for Australian listeners than for the corresponding Australian English vowels. We discuss this perceptual tolerance for vowel variation in terms of how perceptual assimilation of phonetic details into abstract vowel categories may contribute to recognizing words across variable pronunciations. Experiment 2 determined whether short-term multi-talker exposure would facilitate accent adaptation, particularly for those vowels that proved more difficult to categorize in Experiment 1. For each accent separately, participants listened to a pre-test passage in the nonce word accent but told by novel talkers before completing the same task as in Experiment 1. In contrast to previous studies showing rapid adaptation to talker-specific variation, our listeners’ subsequent vowel assimilations were largely unaffected by exposure to other talkers’ accent-specific variation.

An examination of the different ways that non-native phones may be perceptually assimilated as uncategorized.

This study examined three ways that perception of non-native phones may be uncategorized relative to native (L1) categories: focalized (predominantly similar to a single L1 category), clustered (similar to > 2 L1 categories), and dispersed (not similar to any L1 categories). In an online study, Egyptian Arabic speakers residing in Egypt categorized and rated all Australian English vowels. Evidence was found to support focalized, clustered, and dispersed uncategorized assimilations. Second-language (L2) category formation for uncategorized assimilations is predicted to depend upon the degree of perceptual overlap between the sets of L1 categories listeners use in assimilating each phone within an L2 contrast.

Location, Location, Location! Regional Characteristics and National Patterns of Change in the Vowels of Melbourne Adolescents

Evidence of Australian English vowel shifting has been found recently, in data primarily from Sydney and surrounding areas. Although regional variation in the Australian accent remains under-investigated, some signs of regional vowel differences have been found, suggesting that data from other regional centres must also be considered to accurately assess the nature and extent of vowel change. This study contributes to the ongoing re-assessment of Australian vowel characteristics by examining formant data of the /hVd/ vowels of 13 female and nine male adolescents from Melbourne, in relation to recent data from Sydney and Adelaide and earlier data from New South Wales. Results yield evidence of regional vowel differences, with signs that these interact with vowel innovation, and that the presence of regional and innovative vowel characteristics differs for males and females.

Vocabulary size matters: The assimilation of second-language Australian English vowels to first-language Japanese vowel categories

ABSTRACTAdult second-language (L2) learners’ perception of L2 phonetic segments is influenced by first-language phonological and phonetic properties. It was recently proposed that L2 vocabulary size in adult learners is related to changes in L2 perception (perceptual assimilation model), analogous to the emergence of first-language phonological function (i.e., attunement to the phonological identity of words) associated with the “vocabulary explosion” at 18 months. In a preliminary investigation of the relationship between L2 perception and vocabulary size, Japanese learners of Australian English identified Australian English vowels, provided goodness of fit ratings, and completed a vocabulary size questionnaire. We adopted a “whole-system” approach, allowing learners to apply all native vowel system possibilities to the full L2 vowel system. Learners with a larger L2 vocabulary were more consistent in their vowel assimilation patterns, compatible with the L2 perceptual assimilation model.

The effect of correlation on strength of evidence estimates in Forensic Voice Comparison: uni- and multivariate Likelihood Ratio-based discrimination with Australian English vowel acoustics

The consequences of ignoring correlations between features in traditional forensic speaker recognition are investigated. Two likelihood ratio-based discrimination experiments on the same multivariate formant data are described, one taking correlation into account and the other not doing so. The discrimination is performed using Naive Bayes univariate, and multivariate generative Likelihood Ratios (LRs) as discriminant functions, exemplified with Tippett plots and evaluated with the C llr cost function. It is shown that ignoring within-segment correlation can result in considerable over- or under-estimation of the strength of evidence when traditional features are used, and there is poorer overall discrimination between same-speaker and different-speaker pairs. The use of logistic-regression fusion to handle between-segment correlation is also demonstrated.

The Acoustic Characteristics of /hVd/ Vowels in the Speech of some Australian Teenagers*

The study presents an acoustic examination of the 18 stressed monophthongs and diphthongs of Standard Australian English, detailing the frequency and durational characteristics of these vowels produced in the hVd context by 60 male and 60 female adolescent talkers from Sydney. It entails a rigorous acoustic analysis using objective signal processing techniques to detail vowel structure in a strictly controlled fashion. The paper additionally provides the first large-scale published analysis of vowels produced by Australian females and compares vowel formant and durational characteristics across the sexes. The results provide a point of reference for those who require detailed acoustic information about Standard Australian English vowel production.

Linear scaling of vowel-formant ensembles (VFEs) in consonantal contexts

There are familiar terms such as “contour” and “trajectory” to refer to a vowel formant frequency as a function defined on the time axis, but there is no readily understood term for the analogous idea of how a formant behaves on the “vowel axis”. For this we introduce the concept of a vowel-formant ensemble (VFE) as the set of values realized for a given formant (e.g., F 2) in going from vowel to vowel among a speaker's vowel phonemes for a fixed time frame in a fixed CVC context. The VFE affords a simple description of our development: we observe that D.J. Broad and F. Clermont's [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 81 (1987) 155] formant-contour model is a linear function of its vowel target and that as a consequence all its VFEs for a given speaker and formant number are linearly scaled copies of one another. Are VFEs in actual speech also linearly scaled? To show how this question can be addressed, we use F 1 and F 2 data on one male speaker's productions of 7 Australian English vowels in 7 CVd contexts, with each CVd repeated 5 times. Our hypothesized scaling relation gives a remarkably good fit to these data, with a residual rms error of only about 14 Hz for either formant after discounting random variations among repetitions. The linear scaling implies a type of normalization for context which shrinks the intra-vowel scatter in the F 1F 2 plane. VFE scaling is also a new tool which should be useful for showing how contextual effects vary over the duration of the syllable's vocalic nucleus.

The perceptual magnet effect in Australian English vowels.

Recent research (Kuhl, 1991) has suggested that the internal structure of vowel categories is graded in terms of stimulus goodness. It has been proposed that a best instance stimulus reflects a central point or prototype, which effectively renders within-category members perceptually more similar. Discrimination experiments suggest a nonlinear relationship between acoustic and perceptual space near category centers (Iverson & Kuhl, 1995b). This phenomenon has been described as the perceptual magnet effect. The present study investigated the presence of the perceptual magnet effect in five Australian vowel categories. Australian English speakers identified, rated, and discriminated between a pool of 32 vowel stimuli that varied in F1 and F2 values. The results from Experiments 1 and 2 showed that subjects were able to judge the quality and identify of each stimulus and that a general grading of stimulus quality was reported. This was not symmetrical, and the subjects' responses varied considerably. In Experiment 3, closer control of the methodology in the discrimination task and of contextual factors influencing the test materials was exercised. Despite this, evidence of the warping of perceptual space in discrimination data was not found. In general, these results do not provide support for the existence of the perceptual magnet effect, and explanations for this finding are discussed.

Acoustic evidence for dynamic formant trajectories in Australian English vowels.

The extent to which it is necessary to model the dynamic behavior of vowel formants to enable vowel separation has been the subject of debate in recent years. To investigate this issue, a study has been made on the vowels of 132 Australian English speakers (male and female). The degree of vowel separation from the formant values at the target was contrasted to that from modeling the formant contour with discrete cosine transform coefficients. The findings are that, although it is necessary to model the formant contour to separate out the diphthongs, the formant values at the target, plus vowel duration are sufficient to separate out the monophthongs. However, further analysis revealed that there are formant contour differences which benefit the within-class separation of the tense/lax monophthong pairs.

An acoustic comparison between New Zealand and Australian English vowels*

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.

The Bernard data revisited*

For the past thirty years John Bernard's acoustic analysis of Australian English vowels (Bernard 1967, 1970) has remained the standard vowel reference for Australian speech researchers. The published papers present a set of data which is generally considered to be representative of vowel productions across the range of accent types available to speakers of the dialect. The present paper provides a reanalysis and reintetpretation of some aspects of the classic Bernard account focusing on the significant spectral differences between the accent types and examining age heterogeneity within the original sample. Multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) is used to investigate the effects of accent type and age on formant frequency values. The results reveal the presence of numerous accent and age effects. Univariate ANOVA and t‐tests are used to further refine the analysis and establish the specific differences between the age and accent groups. The presence of age effects can, in some instances, be interpreted as evidence of changes that were in progress at the time of the data collection.

An acoustic phonetic study of broad, general, and cultivated Australian English vowels*

The focus of this paper is an acoustic analysis of citation‐form monophthongs and diphthongs produced by a large number of male and female talkers whose accents vary from broad to general to cultivated and who were recorded as part of the Australian National Database of Spoken Language (ANDOSL). Following an initial auditory categorisation of the talkers’ accents, the formants frequencies were calculated and the data were labelled for vowel target positions. Four main kinds of analysis were carried out: of monophthongs, of onglides in /i u/ vowels, of the trajectories in rising diphthongs, and of the trajectories of falling diphthongs. Consistently with earlier studies, the results show that the broad/general/cultivated accent differences are confined mostly to the rising diphthongs and to ongliding in /i/. The production of the falling diphthongs was found to be phonetically the most variable of all vowel categories. Some proposals are included for a modification to the transcription system of Australian English.

Coproduction, accent, and the tense/lax vowel contrast

The kinematics of accented versus unaccented syllables was analyzed in a corpus of Australian English. It was found that unaccented productions of the long vowel /a:/ in the word ‘‘barb’’ show evidence of articulatory truncation. In other words, opening jaw movements into the long vowel are cut short by the jaw-raising gesture for the final /b/. Unaccented vowels were best modeled as more ‘‘coarticulated’’ or coproduced versions of accented vowels in this corpus. As part of the same experiment, the kinematics of the vowel contrast /a/ vs /a:/ was also examined. Previous studies of Australian English vowels note the acoustic similarity of the vowels in words like ‘‘cut’’ versus ‘‘cart.’’ While treated phonologically as part of the set of tense/lax contrasts in Australian English, it is perhaps more accurately described as a vowel quantity as opposed to vowel quality contrast. Evidence of articulatory truncation or coproduction was also found in three speakers’ productions of the first (short) vowel in accented versions of the two words ‘‘bub’’ and ‘‘barb.’’ The short vowel was best modeled as a co-produced version of the long vowel. However, there was also evidence of alternative articulatory strategies implying some movement or gesture-specific dynamics in addition to intergestural articulatory timing strategies.

Dynamic and Target Theories of Vowel Classification: Evidence from Monophthongs and Diphthongs in Australian English

Recent studies on the perception of speech have suggested that vowel identification depends on dynamic cues, rather than a single ‘static’ spectral slice at the vowel midpoint. The experiments reported in this paper seek both to test the extent to which vowel recognition depends on dynamic information, and to identify the nature of the dynamic cues on which such recognition might depend. Gaussian classification techniques, as well as different kinds of neural network architectures, were used to classify some 3000 vowels in /CVd/ citation-form Australian English words, following training on roughly the same number of vowel tokens produced by different talkers. The first set of experiments shows that when vowels are classified from three spectral slices taken at the vowel margins and midpoint, only diphthongs, but not monophthongs, benefit from the additional spectral information at the vowel margins. A further experiment shows that vowels are no better classified from a time-delay neural network than from the three-slice network in which time is not explicitly represented. At least for the citation-form, Australian English vowels in this study, these results are interpreted as being more consistent with a target, rather than a dynamic, theory of vowel perception.

A revised standard phonemic orthography for Australian English vowels1

(1994). A revised standard phonemic orthography for Australian English vowels. Australian Journal of Linguistics: Vol. 14, No. 1, pp. 93-107.