An acoustic analysis of ‘happy-tensing’ in the Queen's Christmas broadcasts

Harrington, Jonathan

doi:10.1016/j.wocn.2005.08.001

Cited by 156 publications

(102 citation statements)

References 52 publications

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“…4 An important assumption made here is that changes in the phonetic realization of forms are initiated by adult language users, and that these (possibly biased) forms form the input for language learners. This assumption is consistent with findings that phonetic realization of categories can indeed change over the lifetime (Harrington et al 2000;Harrington 2006;Sankoff and Blondeau 2007) but also allows for the fact that children often acquire qualitatively different grammars from those of their parents (Sankoff and Laberge 1973;Payne 1976Payne , 1980Hudson Cam and Newport 2005;cf. Foulkes and Vihman in press).…”

Section: Simulating Sound Change: Case Studiessupporting

confidence: 85%

Incipient tonogenesis in Phnom Penh Khmer: Computational studies

Kirby

2014

Laboratory Phonology

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Abstract:In the colloquial Phnom Penh dialect of Khmer (Cambodian), lexical use of F 0 is emerging together with an intermediate VOT category and breathy phonation following the loss of /r/ in onsets (e.g., ្រ ក� /kruː/ 'teacher' > [k h ṳ̀ ː]). I show how this incipient tonogenesis might arise in a series of computational simulations tracing the evolution of multivariate phonetic category distributions in a population of ideal observers. Acoustic production data from a fieldwork study conducted in Phnom Penh was used as the starting point for the simulations. After establishing that the basic framework predicted relative stability over time, two possible responses to a phonetic production bias were considered: one in which agents correctly identified the source of (and thereby compensated for) the effects of the bias, and one in which agents misattributed the acoustic effects of the bias as a property of the onset. Good qualitative fits to the empirical production data were found for the latter group of learners, while the outcome for compensating learners resembled production data from a related dialect. These results are consistent with the sudden and discontinuous nature of many sound changes, and suggest that what appear to be enhancement effects may also emerge under different assumptions about the number of cue dimensions accessible to or deemed relevant by the learner.

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Section: Simulating Sound Change: Case Studiessupporting

confidence: 85%

Incipient tonogenesis in Phnom Penh Khmer: Computational studies

Kirby

2014

Laboratory Phonology

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“…There is rarely a reliable acoustic boundary between liquids and vowels (Lawson, Stuart-Smith, Scobbie, Yaeger-Dror & Maclagan 2011:81), so no attempt was made to place such a boundary, instead using a technique detailed below to capture vowel quality. The first two formants (F1, F2) were estimated across the labelled interval in Emu (Harrington 2010) via Linear Predictive Coding using a 45 ms Blackman window with 10 ms window shift. Formant values were overlaid on wideband spectrograms and any errors were corrected using Emu's formant correction tool.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Intersectionality and the social meanings of variation: Class, ethnicity, and social practice

Kirkham

2015

Lang. Soc.

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A B S T R A C TThis article examines how the social meanings of phonetic variation in a British adolescent community are influenced by a complex relationship between ethnicity, social class, and social practice. I focus on the realisation of the HAPPY vowel in Sheffield English, which is reported to be a lax variant [ɛ] amongst working-class speakers but is undergoing change towards a tense variant [i] amongst middle-class speakers. I analyse the acoustic realisation of this vowel across four female communities of practice in a multiethnic secondary school and find that the variable's community-wide associations of social class are projected onto the ethnographic category of school orientation, which I suggest is a more local interpretation of class relations. Ethnographic evidence and discourse analysis reveal that local meanings of the HAPPY vowel vary further within distinctive community of practice styles, which is the result of how ethnicity and social class intersect in structuring local social practices. (Intersectionality, indexicality, social meaning, identity, ethnicity, social class)*

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“…For example, Harrington (2006Harrington ( , 2007 showed that over a span of about 50 years, the lax vowel /ɪ/ in happy, as produced by HRH Queen Elizabeth II (in her annual Christmas addresses), developed tensing and thus converged towards the speech of ordinary people. Also, research shows that speakers mediate social distance (Giles and Coupland 1991) by adjusting their speaking styles.…”

Section: Perceptual Learning: Convergence and Divergencementioning

confidence: 99%

Sound change in an urban setting: Category instability of the palatal fricative in Berlin

Jannedy

Weirich

2014

Laboratory Phonology

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Abstract:The differential categorization of identical stimuli depending on the presence of a prime is described as a perceptual divergence effect. We examined whether native listeners of the Berlin vernacular of German categorized identical acoustic stimuli differently in the explicit context of the names of two different districts of Berlin, assuming that listeners infer social information and linguistic stereotypes based on the names of these neighborhoods (Kreuzberg vs. Zehlendorf). All listeners categorized natural acoustic stimuli with synthetic fricatives synthesized along a continuum ranging from /ç/ to /ʃ/ as either Fichte /fɪçtə/ ('spruce') or fischte /fɪʃtə/ (1st person sg. 'to fish'). This variable was chosen because many young multiethnic speakers of Berlin German pronounce /ç/ as [ ʃ ] or [ɕ], and this alternation is highly associated with speakers with a migrant background from Kreuzberg. Data were gathered in a forced-choice identification task, and, for a subset of the participants, reaction times (RTs) were also gathered. Results indicate a differential categorization pattern depending on (1) the copresented information, i.e., Kreuzberg, Zehlendorf, or none (control), and (2) the age of the listeners, with older listeners being more affected by the co-presented information. While older listeners categorized significantly more /ʃ/ sounds in the context of Kreuzberg than in the control or Zehlendorf condition, younger listeners rated most /ʃ/ sounds in the control condition (no added information). Results are interpreted in terms of a potential sound change in progress: the loss of the phoneme contrast between /ç/ and /ʃ/.

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An acoustic analysis of ‘happy-tensing’ in the Queen's Christmas broadcasts

Cited by 156 publications

References 52 publications

Incipient tonogenesis in Phnom Penh Khmer: Computational studies

Incipient tonogenesis in Phnom Penh Khmer: Computational studies

Intersectionality and the social meanings of variation: Class, ethnicity, and social practice

Sound change in an urban setting: Category instability of the palatal fricative in Berlin

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