Segmental features of child-directed speech (CDS) were studied in a corpus drawn from thirtynine mothers living in Tyneside, England. Focus was on the phonetic variants used for (t) in word-medial and word-final prevocalic contexts since it is known that these variants display clear sociolinguistic patterning in the adult community. Variant usage in CDS was found to differ markedly from that in interadult speech. Effects were also found with respect to the age and gender of the children being addressed. Speech to girls generally contained more standard variants than speech to boys, which, by contrast, contained higher rates of vernacular variants. The differentiation by gender was most apparent for the youngest children. The findings are assessed in comparison to other studies of CDS. It has previously been claimed that modifications made in the CDS register help children to learn linguistic structures and also to learn that speech is a social activity. Our findings suggest that CDS may play an additional role, providing boys and girls as young as 2;0 with differential opportunities to learn the social-indexical values of sociolinguistic variables.

Evidence is presented in this paper of the levelling of the Tyneside (Newcastle) English vowel system toward that of a putative regional standard. This process is hypothesised to follow from the fragmentation of tight‐knit urban communities that formed after large‐scale immigration to Tyneside from elsewhere in the British Isles during the 18th and 19th centuries. High levels of dialect contact brought about by this influx are argued to have promoted the creation of an urban koiné, which in its contemporary form appears increasingly to be losing specifically local features. In addition to contact and mobility as agents of change, the history of unusually acute stigma attached to Tyneside speech should be considered. These and other social factors inform an analysis of the FACE and GOAT variables in the speech of 32 contemporary Tyneside English speakers of various ages, both sexes and from two social class groups.

This article evaluates a speaker-intrinsic vowel formant frequency normalization algorithm initially proposed in Watt & Fabricius (2002). We compare how well this routine, known as the S-centroid procedure, performs as a sociophonetic research tool in three ways: reducing variance in area ratios of vowel spaces (by attempting to equalize vowel space areas); improving overlap of vowel polygons; and reproducing relative positions of vowel means within the vowel space, compared with formant data in raw Hertz. The study uses existing data sets of vowel formant data from two varieties of English, Received Pronunciation and Aberdeen English (northeast Scotland). We conclude that, for the data examined here, the S-centroid W&F procedure performs at least as well as the two speakerintrinsic, vowel-extrinsic, formant-intrinsic normalization methods rated as best performing by Adank (2003): Lobanov's (1971) z-score procedure and Nearey's (1978) individual log-mean procedure (CLIH i4 in Adank [2003], CLIH i2 as tested here), and in some test cases better than the latter.The S-centroid vowel normalization procedure, originally presented in detail in Watt & Fabricius (2002), was developed to further research on variation and change in British English vowel systems (e.g., Watt & Tillotson's [2001] discussion of Bradford English). It offered a new normalization method tailored specifically for sociophonetics, optimizing as far as possible comparisons of vowel systems from different speakers, both male and female, without priorThe authors thank Caroline Moreiras and Bronwen Evans for access to Moreiras ' (2006) unpublished vowel formant data, Jillian Oddie for assisting with the Aberdeen data collection and analysis, Tyler Kendall for advice on the NORM suite, Victoria Watt with help with processing the Aberdeen data, and Bernhard Fabricius for assistance with exploratory mathematical and programming tasks. Data collection in Aberdeen was

The distribution of variants of the face and goat vowels in Tyneside English (TE) is assessed with reference to the age, sex, and social class of 32 adult TE speakers. The effects of phonological context and speaking style are also examined. Patterns in the data are suggestive of dialect leveling, whereby localized speech variants become recessive and pronunciations typical of a wider geographical area are adopted. Within this broad pattern, however, there is evidence of parallelism between the vowels in terms of the relative proportions of their variants across speaker groups. It is suggested that pressure to maintain the symmetrical structure of the underlying phonological system is guiding this process. Labov's (1991, 1994) principles of chain shift are discussed in this connection. However, it is argued that the patterns in the data are more plausibly explained by considering the social significance of each variant instead of making reference to variants as socially neutral expressions of abstract phonological categories.

Our social evaluation of other people is influenced by their faces and their voices. However, rather little is known about how these channels combine in forming 'first impressions'. Over five experiments we investigate the relative contributions of facial and vocal information for social judgements: dominance and trustworthiness. The experiments manipulate each of these sources of information within-person, combining faces and voices giving rise to different social attributions. We report that vocal pitch is a reliable source of information for judgements of dominance (Study 1) but not trustworthiness (Study 4). Faces and voices make reliable, but independent contributions to social evaluation. However, voices have the larger influence in judgements of dominance (Study 2), whereas faces have the larger influence in judgements of trustworthiness (Study 5). The independent contribution of the two sources appears to be mandatory, as instructions to ignore one channel do not eliminate its influence (Study 3). Our results show that information contained in both the face and the voice contributes to first impression formation. This combination is, to some degree, outside conscious control, and the weighting of channel contribution varies according the trait being perceived.

The /o/ vowel in the English of Bradford is produced by many speakers as a monophthong with a clearly fronted or central quality. Description of such a pronunciation is, however, all but absent from the literature, suggesting that such pronunciations are a relatively recent development in Bradford speech. The acoustic characteristics of 337 tokens of /o/ are investigated, with a view to matching acoustic cues to the auditory impression of fronting. The findings are assessed with respect to similar fronting patterns in the vowel systems of varieties of English elsewhere in the UK and worldwide, and to the principles of sound change elucidated by Labov (1991, 1994). We conclude that “internal” factors alone are inadequate to explain the current tendency for varieties of English in northern England to feature /o/ fronting, and suggest that the appearance of this variant in Bradford English is the consequence of contact-induced spread.

This study tests the extent of speakers' linguistic accommodation to members of putative in-groups and out-groups in a border locality where such categorizations can be said to be particularly accentuated. Variation in the speech of informants in dialect contact interactions with separate interviewers is analyzed for evidence of speech accommodation in the form of phonological convergence or divergence. The data do not support a straightforward interpretation of accommodation, and findings are considered in terms of evidence required for such an account. Implications for the notion of salience in explanations of contact-induced language change are also considered, as is the significance of the "interviewer effect" in the compilation of data sets for use in quantitative studies of phonological variation and change.

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