Changing Sounds in a Changing City

Abstract

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The beauty in a beast: Minimising the effects of diverse recording quality on vowel formant measurements in sociophonetic real-time studies

“…we can expect to detect a change in the acoustic realisation of this vowel in real-time over the past 40 years. Recent real-time acoustic-phonetic data from Glasgow, comparing speakers from 1916 with those recorded in the 1970s to 2000s, of different ages, suggests that /u/ has lowered over the 20th century (Stuart-Smith et al 2016). Taken together, these findings suggest a real-time process of lowering, and possibly further fronting, i.e.…”

“…The fact that neither apparent-, nor real-time comparisons produced a significant effect may be due to a relatively small sample of this study and a relatively small magnitude of the change (see Stuart-Smith et al 2016). Consequently, an additional model was fit to the du(F1) data, replacing the predictor group by two factors, year of recording (00 vs. 70) and age group of the speakers (O, M, Y).…”

“…We addressed this question using the example of a subset from an electronic real-time corpus of Glaswegian vernacular speech which comprises of diverse recordings made at different points in time, by different people and for different purposes (including sociolinguistic and oral history interviews as well as free conversations, see 2.1; Rathcke and Stuart-Smith 2015;Stuart-Smith et al 2015). 2 We chose /u/ as a case study into disentangling the technical effects from the sound change, given there exists some reliable external evidence for this vowel in both historical and modern-day Scottish English data (McAllister 1938;Macaulay 1977;Johnston and Speitel 1983;Scobbie 2011;Scobbie, Lawson and Stuart-Smith 2012;Stuart-Smith et al 2016).…”

Voice quality and coda /r/ in Glasgow English in the early 20th century

“…We selected the oldest speakers from the Sounds of the City real- and apparent-time spontaneous speech corpus of working-class Glasgow English (Stuart-Smith, Brian, Rathcke, Macdonald, & Lawson, 2017). The recordings analyzed here are mainly oral history interviews, but also some sociolinguistic interviews.…”

Toward “English” Phonetics: Variability in the Pre-consonantal Voicing Effect Across English Dialects and Speakers

“…Most spoken texts were recorded since 2000. • Sounds of the City (SOTC, Stuart- Smith et al, 2017): vernacular and standard Glaswegian from 142 speakers over 4 decades (1970s-2000s), collected from historical archives and sociolinguistic surveys, aligned using LaBB-CAT. • Switchboard (Godfrey et al, 1992): 2,400 spontaneous telephone conversations between random participants from the multiple dialect regions in the United States on a variety of topics, containing data from around 500 speakers.…”