Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-tf8b9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T07:40:24.788Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The contributions of the lips and the tongue to the diachronic fronting of high back vowels in Standard Southern British English

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 July 2011

Jonathan Harrington ,
Felicitas Kleber  and
Ulrich Reubold
Jonathan Harrington
Affiliation:
Institute of Phonetics and Speech Processing, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]
Felicitas Kleber
Affiliation:
Institute of Phonetics and Speech Processing, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]
Ulrich Reubold
Affiliation:
Institute of Phonetics and Speech Processing, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Recent acoustic studies have provided evidence that /u/ (goose) and /ʊ/ (foot) have fronted in the standard accent of England in the last fifty years, but what is less clear is whether this fronting is due entirely to a repositioning of the tongue or whether it has been accompanied by an unrounding of the lips. Four experiments were carried out to shed light on this issue. An acoustic study of anticipatory coarticulation in /s/ in the first of these suggested a similar degree of lip-protrusion for young speakers whose F2 of /u/ was raised compared with that of older speakers. Compatibly, judgments of lip-rounding elicited from cross-dubbed auditory-visual stimuli and an analysis of lip movement showed young speakers' /u/ to be produced with rounded lips. Their tongue positions and movements in the final experiment were found to be almost as advanced for /u/ as for /i/ (fleece) and nearer to a central position for lax /ʊ/ (foot). Taken together, these results confirm firstly, that the diachronic shift in /u/ has involved a realignment of the tongue, but not of the lips; and secondly, that the diachronic shift in /ʊ/ is likely to be a more recent innovation than that of its tense counterpart.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the International Phonetic Association , Volume 41 , Issue 2 , August 2011 , pp. 137 - 156
Copyright
Copyright © International Phonetic Association 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Cox, Felicity. 1999. Vowel change in Australian English. Phonetica 56, 1–27.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cox, Felicity & Palethorpe, Sallyanne. 2001. The changing face of Australian English vowels. In Blair, David B. & Collins, Peter (eds.), Varieties of English around the world: English in Australia, 17–44. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Cruttenden, Alan. 1994. Gimson's pronunciation of English, 5th edn. London: Arnold.Google Scholar
Draxler, Christoph & Klaus, Jänsch. 2004. SpeechRecorder – A universal platform independent multichannel audio recording software. The Fourth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, Lisbon, Portugal, 559–562.Google Scholar
Fabricius, Anne. 2007. Vowel formants and angle measurements in diachronic sociophonetic studies: FOOT-fronting in RP. 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 16), Saarbrücken, Germany, 1477–1480.Google Scholar
Fant, Gunnar. 1960. The acoustic theory of speech production. The Hague: Mouton.Google Scholar
Fridland, Valerie. 2008. Patterns of /uw/, /ʊ/, and /ow/ fronting in Reno, Nevada. American Speech 83, 432–454.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gordon, Elizabeth, Campbell, Lyle, Hay, Jennifer, Maclagan, Margaret, Sudbury, Andrea & Trudgill, Peter. 2004. New Zealand English: Its origins and evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harrington, Jonathan. 2007. Evidence for a relationship between synchronic variability and diachronic change in the Queen's annual Christmas broadcasts. In Cole, Jennifer & Hualde, José Ignacio (eds.), Laboratory phonology 9, 125–143. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Harrington, Jonathan. 2010. The phonetic analysis of speech corpora. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Harrington, Jonathan, Hoole, Philip, Kleber, Felicitas & Reubold, Ulrich. 2011. The physiological, acoustic, and perceptual basis of high back vowel fronting: Evidence from German tense and lax vowels. Journal of Phonetics 39 (2), 121–131.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harrington, Jonathan, Kleber, Felicitas & Reubold, Ulrich. 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.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hawkins, Sarah & Midgley, Jonathan. 2005. Formant frequencies of RP monophthongs in four age groups of speakers. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 35, 183–199.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Henton, Caroline G. 1983. Changes in the vowels of Received Pronunciation. Journal of Phonetics 11, 353–371.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hoole, Philip. 1999. On the lingual organization of the German vowel system. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 106, 1020–1032.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hoole, Philip & Zierdt, Andreas. 2010. Five-dimensional articulography. In Maassen, Ben & van Lieshout, Pascal H. H. M. (eds.), Speech motor control: New developments in basic and applied research, 331–349. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Labov, William. 1994. Principles of linguistic change: Internal factors. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Labov, William, Ash, Sharon & Boberg, Charles. 2006. The atlas of North American English: Phonetics, phonology. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lindblom, Björn. 1963. Spectrographic study of vowel reduction. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 35, 1773–1781.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lindblom, Björn & Studdert-Kennedy, Michael. 1967. On the role of formant transitions in vowel recognition. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 42, 830–843.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lindblom, Björn & Sundberg, Johan. 1971. Acoustical consequences of lip, tongue, jaw, and larynx movement. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 50, 1166–1179.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Maclagan, Margaret & Hay, Jennifer. 2007. Getting fed up with our feet: Contrast maintenance and the New Zealand English front vowel shift. Language Variation and Change 19 (1), 1–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maddieson, Ian. 1984. Patterns of sounds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Majors, Tivoli & Gordon, Matthew J.. 2008. The [+spread] of the Northern Cities Shift. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 14 (2), 110–120.Google Scholar
Mann, Virginia A. & Repp, Bruno H.. 1980. Influence of vocalic context on perception of the [ʃ]–[s] distinction. Perception & Psychophysics 28, 213–228.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
McDougall, Kirsty & Nolan, Francis. 2007. Discrimination of speakers using the formant dynamics of /uː/ in British English. 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 16), Saarbrücken, Germany, 1825–1828.Google Scholar
Ohala, John. 1981. The listener as a source of sound change. In Masek, Carrie S., Hendrick, Roberta A. & Miller, Mary Frances (eds.), Parasession on Language and Behavior (CLS), 178–203. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.Google Scholar
Ohala, John. 1993. The phonetics of sound change. In Jones, Charles (ed.), Historical linguistics: Problems and perspectives, 237–278. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Ohala, John & Feder, Deborah. 1994. Listeners’ normalization of vowel quality is influenced by ‘restored’ consonantal context. Phonetica 51, 111–118.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Perkell, Joseph S., Matthies, Melanie L., Svirsky, Mario A. & Jordan, Michael I.. 1993. Trading relations between tongue-body raising and lip rounding in production of the vowel /u/: A pilot ‘motor equivalence’ study. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 93, 2948–2961.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pierrehumbert, Janet. 2003. Phonetic diversity, statistical learning, and acquisition of phonology. Language & Speech 46, 115–154.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Schötz, Susanne. 2003. Speaker age: A first step from analysis to synthesis. 15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 16), Barcelona, Spain, 2585–2588.Google Scholar
Schwartz, Jean-Luc, Boë, Louis-Jean, Vallée, Nathalie & Abry, Christian. 1997. Major trends in vowel system inventories. Journal of Phonetics 25, 233–253.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stevens, Kenneth & House, Arthur. 1963. Perturbation of vowel articulations by consonantal context: An acoustical study. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 6, 111–127.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Traunmüller, Hartmut & Öhrström, Niklas. 2007. Audiovisual perception of openness and lip rounding in front vowels. Journal of Phonetics 35, 244–258.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Watson, Catherine I. & Harrington, Jonathan. 1999. Acoustic evidence for dynamic formant trajectories in Australian English vowels. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 106, 458–468.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Watson, Catherine I., Maclagan, Margaret & Harrington, Jonathan. 2000. Acoustic evidence for vowel change in New Zealand English. Language Variation and Change 12, 51–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wells, John C. 1997. Whatever happened to Received Pronunciation? In Medina Casado, Carmelo & Soto Palomo, Concepción (eds.), II Jornadas de Estudios Ingleses, 2nd edn., 19–28. Universidad de Jaén, Spain. http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/rphappened.htm (retrieved 8 November 2010).Google Scholar
Xue, Steve An & Hao, Grace J.. 2003. Changes in the human vocal tract due to aging and the acoustic correlates of speech production: A pilot study. Journal of Speech, Language & Hearing Research 46 (3), 689–701.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed