Rights statement: © 2019 Acoustical Society of America
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Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - Dialect variation in formant dynamics
T2 - The acoustics of lateral and vowel sequences in Manchester and Liverpool English
AU - Kirkham, Sam
AU - Nance, Claire
AU - Littlewood, Bethany
AU - Lightfoot, Kate
AU - Groarke, Eve
N1 - © 2019 Acoustical Society of America
PY - 2019/2/28
Y1 - 2019/2/28
N2 - This study analyses the time-varying acoustics of laterals and their adjacent vowels in Manchester and Liverpool English. We use Generalized Additive Mixed-Models (GAMMs) for quantifying time-varying formant data, which allows us to model non-linearities in acoustic time series while simultaneously modelling speaker and word level variability in the data. We compare these models to single time-point analyses of lateral and vowel targets in order to determine what analysing formant dynamics can tell us about dialect variation in speech acoustics. The results show that lateral targets exhibit robust differences between some positional contexts and also between dialects, with smaller differences present in vowel targets. The time-varying analysis shows that dialect differences frequently occur globally across the lateral and adjacent vowels. These results suggest a complex relationship between lateral and vowel targets and their coarticulatory dynamics, which problematizes straightforward claims about the realization of laterals and their adjacent vowels. We further discuss these findings in terms of hypotheses about positional and sociophonetic variation. In doing so, we demonstrate the utility of GAMMs for analysing time-varying multi-segmental acoustic signals, and highlight the significance of our results for accounts of English lateral typology.
AB - This study analyses the time-varying acoustics of laterals and their adjacent vowels in Manchester and Liverpool English. We use Generalized Additive Mixed-Models (GAMMs) for quantifying time-varying formant data, which allows us to model non-linearities in acoustic time series while simultaneously modelling speaker and word level variability in the data. We compare these models to single time-point analyses of lateral and vowel targets in order to determine what analysing formant dynamics can tell us about dialect variation in speech acoustics. The results show that lateral targets exhibit robust differences between some positional contexts and also between dialects, with smaller differences present in vowel targets. The time-varying analysis shows that dialect differences frequently occur globally across the lateral and adjacent vowels. These results suggest a complex relationship between lateral and vowel targets and their coarticulatory dynamics, which problematizes straightforward claims about the realization of laterals and their adjacent vowels. We further discuss these findings in terms of hypotheses about positional and sociophonetic variation. In doing so, we demonstrate the utility of GAMMs for analysing time-varying multi-segmental acoustic signals, and highlight the significance of our results for accounts of English lateral typology.
U2 - 10.1121/1.5089886
DO - 10.1121/1.5089886
M3 - Journal article
VL - 145
SP - 784
EP - 794
JO - Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
JF - Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
SN - 0001-4966
IS - 784
ER -