Perceptual coding reliability of (L)-vocalization in casual speech data

Several western Swiss German dialects roughly grouped around the nation's capital Bern show /l/ > [u] vocalization in various contexts. The spatial boundaries of /l/-vocalization in Swiss German are suspected to have been expanding since being described in the Linguistic Atlas of German-Speaking Switzerland in the middle of the 20th century. The present study assesses the overall expansion of /l/-vocalization by means of a rapid anonymous survey in 20 urban regional centers situated just beyond the traditional boundaries of /l/-vocalization highlighted by the Atlas. Results show that the expansion of /l/-vocalization mainly progresses in southeasterly, southerly, and westerly directions, but with much less success to the north and northwest, where the equally influential dialectal areas of Basel and Zürich seem to exert opposing influences. Further analysis of the data indicates that somewhat differing constraint hierarchies are at work in the different places to which vocalization has diffused.

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“…Hall-Lew & Fix, 2012;McElhinny, 1999). An alternative would be to complement the auditory analysis with acoustic analyses.…”

Section: Methodological Rationalementioning

confidence: 99%

The diffusion of /l/-vocalization in Swiss German

et al. 2014

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“…However, this is not as well documented, perhaps because vocalization is not as widespread, or it is not a feature of RP. In fact, many dialects of English are reported as having fullvocalization of /l/, usually post-vocalically, both in the UK (Johnson & Britain, 2007;Scobbie & Pouplier, 2010;Tollfree, 1999) and the US (Ash, 1982;Hall-Lew & Fix, 2012). In England, /l/-vocalization is associated with workingclass Cockney English (Wells, 1982: 313-315), or London English in general, although this realization seems to be spreading (Britain, 2009;Wright, 1989).…”

Section: A Modular Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

Categorical or gradient? An ultrasound investigation of /l/-darkening and vocalization in varieties of English

Turton

2017

Laboratory Phonology: Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology

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This paper presents an empirical analysis of /l/-darkening in English, using ultrasound tongue imaging data from five varieties spoken in the UK. The analysis of near 500 tokens from five participants provides hitherto absent instrumental evidence demonstrating that speakers may display both categorical allophony of light and dark variants, and gradient phonetic effects coexisting in the same grammar. Results are interpreted through the modular architecture of the life cycle of phonological processes, whereby a phonological rule starts its life as a phonetically driven gradient process, over time stabilizing into a phonological process at the phrase level, and advancing through the grammar. Not only does the life cycle make predictions about application at different levels of the grammar, it also predicts that stabilized phonological rules do not replace the phonetic processes from which they emerge, but typically coexist with them, a pattern which is supported in the data. Overall, this paper demonstrates that variation in English /l/ realization has been underestimated in the existing literature, and that we can observe phonetic, phonological, and morphosyntactic conditioning when accounting for a representative range of phonological environments across varieties.

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“…All speakers were born and raised in New York State, and they are all monolingual native speakers of American English. Although we were not able to quantify the amount of tongue tip/blade contact, impressionistically, none of the speakers were /l/-vocalizers in the sense of a perceptibly vocalic-only production of dark [ɫ] (Hall-Lew and Fix 2012). None of the speakers reported history of speech or hearing disorders.…”

Section: Participantsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Morphological effects on the darkness of English intervocalic /l/

Lee-Kim

Davidson

Hwang

2013

Laboratory Phonology

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Abstract:Articulatory and acoustic studies have provided evidence that in word-initial and word-final positions, English /l/ exhibits substantial differences in 'darkness': dark [ɫ] in word-final position is produced with a more retracted tongue dorsum and lowered tongue body than light [l] in word-initial position. The darkness of intervocalic /l/, however, is variable. While Sproat and Fujimura (1993) argue that /l/ darkness is on a continuum strongly affected by duration, Hayes (2000) maintains that the morphological status of intervocalic /l/s should affect whether they are produced as light or dark variants. In this study, ultrasound imaging is used to investigate whether the morphological affiliation of the /l/ affects the degree of tongue dorsum retraction and tongue body lowering and the acoustic characteristics of /l/ darkness. Six American English speakers produced three types of stimuli which were predicted to increase in darkness in the following order: (1) when /l/ corresponded with the onset of a suffix (e.g., flaw-less), (2) when /l/ corresponded with the final position of the stem word (e.g., tall-est), and (3) when /l/ was the final consonant of a stem word (e.g., tall). For both articulatory and acoustic measures, the predicted order was upheld. The strongest articulatory correlate of darkness was tongue body lowering, and acoustic differences were mainly manifested in F1 and normalized intensity. Phonological implications of these findings are discussed.

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Perceptual coding reliability of (L)-vocalization in casual speech data

Cited by 29 publications

References 19 publications

The diffusion of /l/-vocalization in Swiss German

The diffusion of /l/-vocalization in Swiss German

Categorical or gradient? An ultrasound investigation of /l/-darkening and vocalization in varieties of English

Morphological effects on the darkness of English intervocalic /l/

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