Descriptions of Australian Aboriginal English list the neutralisation of the Standard English contrast between so-called voiced and voiceless stops as one characteristic feature. This paper reports on the results of an acoustic analysis of data collected in a production task by monolingual speakers of Standard Australian English in Sydney, of Aboriginal English on Croker Island, Northern Territory, and bilingual speakers of Iwaidja/Aboriginal English and Kunwinjku/Aboriginal English on Croker Island. The results show that average values for Voice Onset Time, the main correlate of the “stop voicing contrast” in English, and Closure Duration collected from Aboriginal speakers of English do not significantly differ from that of speakers of Standard Australian English, irrespective of language background. This result proves that the stop contrast is not neutralised by these Aboriginal speakers of English. However, it can be shown that phonetic voicing manifesting itself in Voice Termination Time is a prevalent and characteristic feature of Aboriginal English on Croker Island. This feature aligns Aboriginal English on Croker Island with local Aboriginal languages and differentiates it from Standard Australian English.
The social categories that characterize a speaker frequently correlate with the use of specific linguistic variables. Research suggests that such correlations are sometimes recognized as socially-indexed meanings. This study examines Japanese individuals’ attitudes toward variables that have been shown to correlate with the social category of gender in production. In particular, we contrast patterns of gendered variation that (i) have been prescriptively associated with speaker sex and (ii) tend to correlate with gender in speech production but are outside of the set of prescriptive “women’s language”. We found that individuals have formed associations between the gender of the speaker and prescriptive variables but not other patterns of variation. Additionally, knowledge of the speech context of the variables had no significant effect on individuals’ judgments. The results indicate that not all social information available from patterns of language use is recovered by listeners. More broadly, examining the transmission of social meaning through linguistic variation requires a combination of production- and perception-based research methods.
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