A cross-dialectal acoustic comparison of vowels in Northern and Southern British English

Abstract

This study compares the duration and first two formants (F1 and F2) of 11 nominal monophthongs and five nominal diphthongs in Standard Southern British English (SSBE) and a Northern English dialect. F1 and F2 trajectories were fitted with parametric curves using the discrete cosine transform (DCT) and the zeroth DCT coefficient represented formant trajectory means and the first DCT coefficient represented the magnitude and direction of formant trajectory change to characterize vowel inherent spectral change (VISC). Cross-dialectal comparisons involving these measures revealed significant differences for the phonologically back monophthongs /ɒ, ɔː, ʊ, uː/ and also /зː/ and the diphthongs /eɪ, əʊ, aɪ, ɔɪ/. Most cross-dialectal differences are in zeroth DCT coefficients, suggesting formant trajectory means tend to characterize such differences, while first DCT coefficient differences were more numerous for diphthongs. With respect to VISC, the most striking differences are that /uː/ is considerably more diphthongized in the Northern dialect and that the F2 trajectory of /əʊ/ proceeds in opposite directions in the two dialects. Cross-dialectal differences were found to be largely unaffected by the consonantal context in which the vowels were produced. The implications of the results are discussed in relation to VISC, consonantal context effects and speech perception.

Fronting of Southern British English high-back vowels in articulation and acoustics

“…Thus, dynamic effects deserve to be considered both in articulatory methodology and in vowel description. This is further reinforced by recent findings that dynamic characteristics of the acoustic signal are predictive of sociophonetic factors, such as speaker age and social class (Haddican et al, 2013;Hughes & Foulkes, 2015), as well as dialect (Williams & Escudero, 2014).…”

“…In this work, we pursued a dynamic approach to vowel measurements, as previously done by Harrington et al (2008), Williams & Escudero (2014 and Docherty et al (2015), inter alia. There is a growing consensus in the field that dynamic measurements of vowels provide a more complete view of vowel characteristics, and they avoid a necessarily arbitrary choice of selecting a specific time point where the measurements are taken.…”

Disentangling the effects of long-term language contact and individual bilingualism: The case of monophthongs in Welsh and English

“…Amongst these, a particularly interesting case is English FOOT which is much more fronted than its Welsh counterpart hwd. This pattern is intriguing in the light of widespread evidence for back vowel fronting in varieties of English around the world (Cox & Palethorpe, 2001;Ferragne & Pellegrino, 2010;Williams & Escudero, 2014b). FOOT in Carmarthenshire…”

The Formant Dynamics of Long Close Vowels in Three Varieties of Swedish

“…The 2 nd DCT coefficient (C2) was excluded since it contains little additional information as compared to C0 and C1 (e.g. [14], [15]). In order to lessen the effect of measurement errors from the automatic formant analysis, outliers were removed from all measures with an R script [21] using the Tukey's method [22].…”

“…[11], [12], [13]), others have used the coefficients of formant tracks fitted with the discrete cosine transform (DCT) to analyse formant means as well as the direction and magnitude of the formant change (e.g. [14], [15]). …”