Hiatus resolution and linking ‘r’ in Australian English

Abstract

Hiatus occurs when the juxtaposition of syllables results in two separate vowels occurring alongside one another. Such vowel adjacency, both within words and across word boundaries, is phonologically undesirable in many languages but can be resolved using a range of strategies including consonant insertion. This paper examines linguistic and extralinguistic factors that best predict the likelihood of inserted linking ‘r’ across word boundaries in Australian English. Corpus data containing a set of 32 phrases produced in a sentence-reading task by 103 speakers were auditorily and acoustically analysed. Results reveal that linguistic variables of accentual context and local speaking rate take precedence over speaker-specific variables of age, gender and sociolect in the management of hiatus. We interpret this to be a reflection of the phonetic manifestation of boundary phenomena. The frequency of the phrase containing the linking ‘r’, the frequency of an individual's use of linking ‘r’, and the accentual status of the flanking vowels all affect the /ɹ/ strength (determined by F3), suggesting that a hybrid approach is warranted in modelling liaison. Age effects are present for certain prosodic contexts indicating change in progress for Australian English.

Glottalisation of word-final stops in Australian English unstressed syllables

“…• the onset of a high energy periodic F2 signalling the onset of the initial (stressed) vowel • the cessation of high energy F2 signalling the end of the second (unstressed) vowel • the presence and duration of a voice bar in the stop closure • the release burst of the coda stop • the F3 trough signalling the target of the intervocalic rhotic (Espy-Wilson et al 2000, Foulkes & Docherty 2000, Hay & Maclagan 2012, Cox et al 2014, Yuen, Cox & Demuth 2018 • the presence and duration of glottalisation The presence and duration of glottalisation was identified through irregular pitch periods in the second half of the voiced /V®0/ sequence, visible as irregularity in the waveform and a sudden increase in the duration between periods in conjunction with irregularity in amplitude in the wideband spectrogram. We acknowledge that isolated words each represent a separate intonational phrase and therefore phrase final creak may be evident.…”

De petits corpus pour une grande base de données sur l’anglais oral contemporain : quels enjeux à la lumière du programme PAC ?

“…Il est donc difficile de l'étudier systématiquement et à grande échelle, à moins de mettre en place un protocole et un outil de codage adaptés qui permettent de comparer les résultats issus de plusieurs enquêtes. C'est ce qu'a fait le programme PAC, ce qui a permis de mettre à l'épreuve de données authentiques les modélisations théoriques existantes et de montrer non seulement les contraintes morphosyntaxiques et prosodiques particulières qui pèsent sur ce phénomène (voir Durand et al 2014(voir Durand et al , 2015, mais également l'importance des usages et de la mémorisation de séquences dans sa production, à l'image de ce qu'ont défendu Cox et al (2014) pour le cas particulier de l'anglais australien. D'ailleurs, les potentialités des petits corpus PAC ne s'arrêtent pas aux comparaisons entre variétés de l'anglais puisqu'il est également possible, sur la base d'une comparaison avec les résultats obtenus par le programme PFC sur la liaison en français, de réfléchir à ces deux phénoménologies (voir Navarro & Viollain en préparation), notamment à des fins didactiques pour traiter la production des apprenants francophones de l'anglais (voir Herry-Bénit et al en préparation).…”

/r/-sandhi in the speech of Queen Elizabeth II

“…Bauer 1984) or other non-rhotic varieties (e.g. Foulkes 1997, Hay & Sudbury 2005, Piercy 2012, Cox et al 2014) approach the phenomenon from an APPARENT-TIME perspective. These studies collect data from different age groups at one point in time under the assumption that there is little or no change in a person's accent after reaching adulthood.…”

“…To avoid these problems, and following previous studies (e.g. Cox et al 2014), varying degrees of glottalisation were not differentiated in this study. In any case, typical acoustic cues for glottal stops (e.g.…”