Sound change, lexical frequency, and variability: an experimental phonetic study of Southern British English, Received Pronunciation
Final Report Abstract
The project has been concerned with an investigation of the mechanisms of sound change and their relationship to the production and perception of speech, with specific reference to the standard accent of England Southern British English (SBE). A particular focus of the project has been on assessing the extent of sound change through apparent time studies comparing younger and older speakers by which /u, ʊ/ (lexical sets GOOSE, FOOT) have fronted in the last 50 years. A new approach in this study has been to investigate both the production and the perception of /u, ʊ/ within the same speaker and across two generations. The results of these studies show that /u, ʊ/ are fronted phonetically in younger speakers compared with older speakers. For /u/, younger speakers also showed a parity between production and perception: compared with older speakers, younger speakers had a fronted /u/ in both modalities and the effects of context on either production or perception was less than for older speakers. Similar results were also obtained for the more recent phonetic fronting of /ʊ/ except that perception and production were misaligned in younger speakers: that is, the influence of context in perception was less than in their production which suggests that the sound change may affect perception before production. Subsequent studies were concerned with the physiological mechanisms of /u, ʊ/ fronting. The results showed that the /u, ʊ/ fronting is brought about by tongue-dorsum fronting and not liprounding: physiological studies suggest that the pairs /i, u/ (FLEECE, GOOSE) and /ɪ, ʊ/ (KIT, FOOT) are distinguished in SBE principally by the absence and presence of lip rounding respectively, given that they differ minimally in tongue position. These results also show that SBE /u, ʊ/ can no longer be regarded as back or even central vowels. A further physiological study of all German tense and lax vowels in three consonantal contexts showed that /u/ may be more prone to fronting in the world's languages than /i/ to retraction. This is because the mean tongue dorsum position for /u/ is much for distant from the centre of the speaker's vowel space than is /i/, and because /u/ is produced with particularly high peak velocity. A further reason why /u/ may be more likely to front than /i/ to retract is because there is a slightly greater bias in the languages of the world for /u/ to follow consonants that induce phonetic fronting than for /i/ to follow consonants that induce phonetic retraction. A third part of the project was concerned with the relationship between vowel changes due to physiological ageing and phonetic sound change. The study was longitudinal involving the analysis of over 60 years of broadcast material from two speakers. The results showed that with increasing age, the first formant frequency tracks the falling fundamental frequency especially in phonetically low vowels and to a lesser extent in phonetically high vowels. The importance of this finding is firstly that studies investigating the diachronic change to phonetic height based on apparent time studies need to factor out the confounding F1 changes in open vowels due to increasing biological age; and secondly, that F1 may track f0 in order for the perceived quality of phonetic height to remain approximately constant with increasing age.
Publications
- (2007). Evidence for a relationship between synchronic variability and diachronic change in the Queen’s annual Christmas broadcasts. In J. Cole and J. Hualde (Eds.) Laboratory Phonology 9 (pp. 125 - 143). Berlin: de Gruyter
Harrington, J.
- (2008). Compensation for coarticulation, /u/-fronting, and sound change in Standard Southern British: an acoustic and perceptual study. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 123, 2825-2835
Harrington, J., Kleber, F., and Reubold, U.
- (2010). Vocal aging effects on F0 and the first formant: a longitudinal analysis in adult speakers. Speech Communication, 52, 638-651
Reubold, U., Harrington, J., and Kleber, F.
- (2011). The contributions of the lips and the tongue to the diachronic fronting of high back vowels in Standard Southern British English. Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 41, 137 - 156
Harrington, J., Kleber, F., and Reubold, U.
- (2011). The physiological, acoustic, and perceptual basis of high back vowel fronting: evidence from German tense and lax vowels. Journal of Phonetics, 39, 121-131
Harrington, J., Hoole, P., Kleber, F., and Reubold, U.
- (2012) The production and perception of coarticulation in two types of sound change in progress. In S. Fuchs, M. Weirich, P. Perrier, D. Pape (Eds) Speech Production and Speech Perception: Planning and Dynamics (pp. 33–55). Peter Lang
Harrington, J., Kleber, F., and Reubold, U.
- (2012) The relationship between the perception and production of coarticulation during a sound change in progress. Language & Speech, 55, 383–405
Kleber, F., Harrington, J., and Reubold, U.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1177/0023830911422194) - (2012). The coarticulatory basis of diachronic high back vowel fronting. In M- J. Solé & D. Recasens (Eds). The Initiation of Sound Change. Perception, Production, and Social factors (pp. 103–122). John Benjamins Publishing Company
Harrington, J.
- (2012). The relationship between synchronic variation and diachronic change. In A. C. Cohn, C. Fougeron, M. Huffman (Eds.), Handbook of Laboratory Phonology (p. 321–332). Oxford University Press: Oxford
Harrington, J.
- Disassociating the effects of age from phonetic change: a longitudinal study of formant frequencies. In: A. Gerstenberg & A. Voeste (Eds.), Language Development: The Lifespan Perspective. Benjamins, 2015. S. 9-38. - 9789027218797
Reubold, U. & Harrington, J.
