LOT summer school
Ultrasound, phonetics, phonology:
Articulation for Beginners!
James M Scobbie
CASL Research Centre
With special thanks to collaborators
Jane Stuart-Smith & Eleanor Lawson
Joanne Cleland & Zoe Roxburgh
Natasha Zharkova, Laura Black, Steve Cowen
Reenu Punnoose, Koen Sebreghts
Sonja Schaeffler & Ineke Mennen
Conny Heyde
Alan Wrench (aka Articulate Instruments Ltd) for AAA software and UTI hardware
Various funding – thank you to ESRC, EPSRC, QMU
June 2013
Ultrafest!
November 2013
Edinburgh
•
Scottish English
1. Rhotic tongue shape
2. Derhoticisation among WC speakers
3. Vowel system generally
•
•
Is it time for some nitty gritty stuff?
Scottish English again
4. Fronted /u/
•
Extensions, if time
–
–
Northern Irish /u/ and diphthongs
Dutch /r/
Sociophonetics / Lg var & change
• Retroflexion vs. bunching for /r/ is claimed to
make little or no acoustic difference in US
English (Boyce & Espy-Wilson 1997, Zhou et al
2008, Guenther et al 1999)
– Sustained phonations
• There is no social variation in the appearance
of the variant shapes (Mielke et al, 2010, Twist
et al 2007)
– USA, among rhotic speakers
• We find strong and consistent MC (bunch) vs.
WC (retroflex) difference in Scottish English
1. Tongue shape for /r/
LM16 “par” TIP UP (retroflex)
EF6 “far” FRONT BUNCHED
LF1 “purr” FRONT UP
EM3 “purr” MID BUNCHED avi
• Lawson, Scobbie and Stuart-Smith (2011)
• Overlay (n=9-12), each frame a speaker
Social variation – MC more bunched
• contra Mielke, Baker and Archangeli for US Eng
Social variation – WC more tip-up
• 2 raters, 49% identical rating and 90%
agreement to adjacent categories within a 5
point rating scale, then the 10% redone.
Results present average
• From light
to dark:
results
• 2x2 Chi2 shows main effects of
– class p<0.001 (MC bunching, except for LM15)
– gender p<0.01 (female bunching, in WC)
results
• Should stats be done on a speaker basis?
Individual tokens and speakers
• MC: Female (left) and Male (right)
palates
/o/
Mean /r/
with 1 s.d.
• WC: Female (left) and Male (right)
Mean /r/ (rotated & translated to /o/)
• I couldn’t find the chart!
• 7/8 WC tip up + 1 rather hyper-triller
• 8/8 MC bunched
Confirmation – glasgow 2011
•
Pre-pausal WC /r/ looks “more retroflex” than
MC /r/
•
•
What about non-prepausal contexts?
When the tongue tip raises, we lose image – are these
characterisations really what we think they are?
•
We come back later to
–
–
the 4-way impressionistic categorical analysis
WC pre-pausal /r/ tends to be late in its postalveolar constriction as well
Summary – tongue shape for /r/
• Vernacular Scottish English is variably derhotic
– breaking / diphthongisation before overt rhotic
consonant
– weakening acoustic rhoticity (loss of trill & high F3
in approx)
– social and age-grading provide apparent-time
evidence
– high % r-loss in contemporary Glasgow (StuartSmith 2007) vs. literature provides evidence of realtime change
2. Derhoticisation and covert /r/
Scottish coda /r/ is weakening in WC speakers
Romaine (1979); Speitel and Johnston (1983); Stuart-Smith (2007)
• MC
auditorily strong, postvocalic /r/ variant
(traditionally labelled as an alveolar or retroflex
approximant
far
purr
poor
• WC
auditorily weak, “derhoticised /r/”,
including pharyngealised vowels and plain vowels
with no /r/ apparent
far
purr
poor
Auditory variation in Scottish coda
/r/
F3
F2
F3
F2
Derhoticised ear (above)
car (below)
Rhotic ear (above)
car (below)
F3
F2
F3
F2
Word-final derhoticisation in ECB08
“…by it’s thought, his passenger. Now, the incident
happened at the town’s Hole Farm Road. I went there
today and found one woman, young mother, Denise
Ponsonby, who claims to have witnessed everything “I heard some screaming – ehm – and I turned to see
two men running in the middle of the road – ehm –
more* or less - - it, - I heard the guys screaming help – ehm When I’ve turned round – ehm - I seen one man chasing
the other – ehm – and then I seen a knife.”
*mair /mer/
Typical derhoticised coda /r/ (radio)
WC speakers in Edinburgh
and Glasgow begin to use
derhoticised variants.. ..
MC and UC Scots begin to use
non-rhotic forms: Morningside
Kelvinside.
1700
Derhoticisation first
evident in S.E. England,
unstressed syllables..
1800
1900
M&K accents are stigmatised.
Non-rhotic forms fall out of favour
with MC speakers.
2000
Continuing social and geographical spread of non-rhotic variants in England.
Anglo vs. vernacular Scottish “r-loss”:
non-rhoticity vs. derhoticisation
• 2 raters, 49% identical rating and 90%
agreement to adjacent categories within a 5
point rating scale, then the 10% redone.
Results present average
• From light
to dark:
results
• On the 9-point compromise scale
• 2-way ANOVA for class and scale showed no
interaction and 2 main effects
• Social class p<0.001
• Gender p<0.05
On the 9-point compromise scale
• Stuart-Smith reports derhoticised rimes often sound
“pharyngealised” for consistent or variable speakers
– /ir/  [iə]… (fronter higher vowels, a centralising diphthong)
– /ɔr/  [ɔˁ]… (lower backer vowels, a pharyngeal offglide)
– /ar/  [ɑ]… (even rhotic speakers have allophonic [ɑɹ] )
• /r/ has multiple gestures (pharyngeal + post-alveolar)
where the latter is more “consonantal” (Sproat &
Fujimura 1993) & the anterior gesture could show
– weakening
– temporal delay
• Gradual gestural change with complex acoustics
• Recall that WC both derhoticise, and are retroflex
Articulatory hypotheses
• In onset, pharyngeal and anterior gestures are
more simultaneous
• In coda, dissociation occurs, to varied degrees
Tongue
blade/tip
raising
[ɹ]
[he]
Tongue root
retraction
[ɹ]
[he]
[ə]
Waterfall time sequence: hair
Spontaneous speech, raw video
•
•
Scobbie & Stuart-Smith (2008) find that articulatorily
a strong rhotic gesture may be retained, delayed
beyond strong source energy into (near-)silence
Seen also in Dutch (Scobbie and Sebregts, 2011)
car
nb
bunched /r/
Covert gesture in a derhoticising speaker
/r/ maximum
constriction after
voicing
offset
before
A two-way between – groups
ANOVA
showed
no
interaction effects for gender
and social class. A main
effects model showed
a
large significant effect for
social class F=65.945 p<0.001
η2= 0.328, n=128
Mean proportional lag in CVr## words in
ECB08 corpus
• Bunched shape is achieved earlier during the rime
(Lawson et al)
• Tip raising associated with delay and covert /r/
Timing of articlatory blade raising max, relative to the acoustic
duration of word
150%
100%
50%
tip up
front up
Timing
front bunched
dorsal bunched
• hut vs. hurt in phrase final position
– 2 derhoticising speakers (m & f)
– M (LM17) hut vs. hurt
– F (LF1) hut vs. hurt2
• Tip up vs. tip down in initial position
• Glottal stop vs. glottally reinforced version of /t/
• [folder]
Movies (single citation words)
• /r/ before a voiceless
stop like /p/ or glottal
/t/ (or before silence)
can be acoustically
masked
– Environments likely to
lead to loss of /r/
• Less likely before
voiced lingual
consonants due to
coarticulation?
• Vowels before /r/ in
word final pre-pausal
position can appear
to occur in open
syllables for the first
time (FUR)
– /ʌ/ new phonotactics
– /ar/ > /ɑ/ new
phoneme
– New role for duration
in system /ʌ/ vs. /ɑ/
Phonological implications
• WC speakers have been observed to have
– weak rhoticity during /r/
– breaking & pharyngealisation before /r/
• Ultrasound has shown that
– Even tokens without much audible rhoticity at all have a
visible /r/ articulation in pre-pausal location, in the silence at
the end of the word
– WC speakers have more “tip-up” /r/ than MC speakers
– MC speakers appear to have a vocalic or syllablic /r/ in some
words, like American English /ɚ/
/r/ & derhoticisation summary
• Functional explanations emphasise lexicality
• Speakers aim to
– maximise perceptibility of lexical/grammatical info
– minimise effort
– also to vary prosodically for information structures
• and
– express a social identity
– vary for social and interpersonal purposes
• and
– use structured input
– deal with novel input
Why make “inaudible” gestures?
• Acquisition, use, change are socially variable at
phonetic and phonological levels
Representation
Hearing & perception
(input vs. intake)
acoustic
listener
oriented
output
articulation
speaker
oriented
output
The speaker-hearer triangle
• Are covert articulations long-lasting (i.e. learnable) or
a phenomenon found at a point in time when there is
an inter-generational loss of /r/?
• What do speakers do, when asked to “mimic” a
derhotic /r/?
– Copy the tongue shape
– Copy the timing (late & perhaps covert)
– Fail to hear that the derhoticised /r/ is even there at all?
• Pilot study by Lawson, with a de-rhoticising model speaker and
a derhoticising mimicker.
How do covert articulations spread?
LM17 “hurt”
provided an audio stimulus
Brief, delayed tongue-tip raising
(derhoticised)
LM 17 “hut”
Simple tip raising and
sometimes none at all
folder
Original covert contrast in LM17
LM17 “hurt”
provided an audio stimulus
Brief, delayed tongue-tip raising
(derhoticised)
Pilot 1’s mimicked version of
LM17’s stimulus of “hurt”
No tip raising (rless) – makes it
rather like “hut?”
Mimicry of LM17
Pilot 1’s mimicked version of
“hurt” audio stimulus.
Pilot 1’s mimicked version of
“hut” audio stimulus.
•No covert rhotic curl in mimicked HURT.
•The durations of mimicked HUT and HURT were almost identical
•Both had glottal stop replacement of /t/
Merged hut & hurt in mimicry?
• P1 unable to mimic LM17’s hut / hurt contrast
• Yet P1 himself has derhotic / covert contrast
• In mimicry he appears to be show categorical
misperception
• He also found connected speech models hard
P1’s baseline “hurt”
P1’s baseline “hut”
• 9 monophthongs in labial & /h/ environments
– beam fame hip hem map hum awe hope boom
– /ieıɛaɔoʉ/
• 9 (in practice 8) vowels before /r/
– beer bare (fir) herb far fur for bore poor
– All vowels take /r/ except /ɪ/ fir (merges with fur)
• Issues with UTI and available real lexical items
–
–
–
–
High/mid vowels are breaking i.e. diphthongal
Low /a/ already has categorical allophony
Low /ʌ/ does not appear in open syllables
Low /ɔ/ has too few minimal pairs (awe vs. or)
• We focus on /ʌ/ & /ʌr/ , and on /a/ & /ar/
– HUT, HURT, HAT, HEART
3. Vowel materials for ECB08
open
n=41
ʌ
a/ɑ
p
t
d
m
pup
pub hub
hut butt
bud
bum mum
hum
purr fir
fur
burp
(verb
herb)
hurt
Burt
bird
(perm) firm
ma pa
baa
map
-
hat
-
pam palm
barb
heart
part
hard
harm farm
arm
par bar harp
far
parp
weak
b
suburb
hammered
Two tokens of materials above plus single tokens from:
Warm-up liquids: ram, rum, lumber, lamb, cull, Mull, hulk, pill, cult, film, bulb
Cool-down vowels: hem, beer, bear, beam, boom, hope, hip, for, awe, poor, fame, bore,
hubbub, with extra cool-down materials for MC participants: sure, pure, bare.
ECB08 materials: single words
• ECB08 corpus shows two (connected?) socially
indexed patterns
– Variation in tongue-shape
– Delayed / weakened post-alveolar constriction
• Covert or acoustically weak contrast in WC
speakers but no mergers or new vowels yet
• Merger of the 3 checked vowels is more common
before /r/ in MC speakers than WC speakers, who
nevertheless merge fir and fur
• Perhaps the bunched shape of MC /r/ is nonaccidentally associated with
– Aggressive coarticulation over a preceding central vowel
– Early /r/ initiation
– Strong rhoticity
• Leading to higher likelihood of merger
• And the occurrence of a new vowel, rhoticised schwa
(“schwar”) or syllabic /r/, whichever seems
theoretically less upsetting
Checked vowels before /r/
• Mergers
acoustics
Just the vowels
With /r/ too
LM16
LM17
LM18
LF1
LF2
LF3
LF4
No recording
EM3
EM4
EM5
MC males
WC females
WC males
LM15
EM4 data less
reliable - probe shift but still tip down
MC females
EF3
EF4
EF5
EF6
• MC “V” early in the rime is almost identical to /r/
in average spline-to-spline distance
• Not just merger
• /r/ vocalisation
• Recall that
WC speakers
derhoticise
• 2 “opposite”
lenitions of
consonantal /r/
Summary and Conclusions
• Lex sets BIRD WORD + HERD merged (8/11)
– Earth, verb, berth, (err) = firm, word, surf, birth, fur
– Monophthong could be rhotic vowel /ɚ/ - it lacks
segmentable vowel + transition + rhotic portion
• No /a/ split (Pam/palm) – contra Aitken 1979
• /ʉ/ is central and not very high
i
ʉ
o
iɹ
ʉɹ
oɹ
e
ı
ɔ
eɹ
ɚ
ɔɹ
ɛ
a
ʌ
verb
firm (fur)
ɑɹ
far
Rhotic (MC) speaker
• More vowels (and environments) with weak /r/
– No merger of /ɛr/ + /ʌr/ (8/8) -& not [ɚ], but [ʌˁ] (_##)
– /a/ “split” (hat/heart) [a] vs. [ɑ] for most derhoticised
– /ʌr/ can be very short [ʌˁ] (sir, blur)
– /ʌr/ vs. /ar/ (_##) still contrast (car)
• Future /ʌ/ merger? (hut/hurt/heart, bud/bird)
i
ʉ
o
iə
ʉə
oʌ
e
ı
ɔ
eə
ɛ
a
ʌ
ɛˤ
herb
ɔˤ
ʌʕ
ɑ
far
Derhoticising (WC) speaker
fur, fir
• MC pattern
• /r/ remains rhotic but can be more “vowel like”!
• /ɛr/ is now merging with /r/ & /ɪr/
• New monophthongal vowel /ɚ/ is descriptive, not causal
• /r/ & /ɪr/ had merged in all speakers… without it?
– //, /ɚ/, /a/ and /ar/ all remain distinct (& /ar/ >>
/r/?)
i
ʉ
o
e
ı
ɔ MC
ɛ
a(ɑ)
ʌ
Derhoticisation and the pL inventory
• If /r/ is vocalising / derhoticising in WC…?
– /r/  // (& /ar/  /ɑ/) in open syllables
– a new phoneme and new phonotactic distribution?
• /a/ (BRA, PALM) vs. /ɑ/ (FAR, FARM)
• // (FIR, FUR) not currently in open syllables
– /r/ and /ar/ may merge in some closed syllables?
– // may merge with /r/ and /ar/ in closed syll?
i
ʉ
o
i
ʉ
o
e
ı
ɔ MC
e
ı
ɔ WC
ɛ
a(ɑ)
ɛ
aɑ
ʌ
ʌ
Derhoticisation and the pL inventory
• MC speakers are more phonetically rhotic
– Strong rhotic quality to /r/
– New rhotic vowel /ɚ/ instead of V+/r/?
– Used in BIRD, WORD, HEARD, leading to merger
• WC speakers
– Plenty of opportunity to guess what might happen
next… “loss” of /r/ leading to new vowels?
– Unclear if derhotic BIRD, WORD, HEARD merged
• More speculations
– /o/ is the new high back corner vowel
– /u/ is fronted… but is it lowered phonologically?
Summary /r/ and vowels