Mixed accents: Scottish children with English parents

We discuss accent mixture and the creation of idiosyncratic phonological systems in acquisition, with a focus on Scottish English. Such mixing is in addition to the relatively stable sociolinguistic systems of variation expected within a speech community, and arises when parents have radically different accents from each other or from the child's peers or other adult models. In terms of traditional geographic dialectology, there are a number of isoglosses around the Scotland/England border, but modern social mobility means that in some Scottish cities there are large numbers of families with at least one non-Scottish adult accent acting as a model for acquisition, which may feed into phonological change. Of particular interest is the influence of Southern British English accents. We exemplify the issues with two short case studies. The first concerns a child with mixed Scottish/English input in the home. His speech patterns do indeed indicate the acquisition of a mixed system. The second focuses on inter-sibling variation, looking at two sibling pairs who exemplify a different mix of accent features from each other. We examine two main diagnostics: monophthongal vs. diphthongal productions of the vowels in FACE and GOAT; and rhoticity. We also describe a parental demographic and accent attitude questionnaire as part of Case Study 2. The results support the need for speaker-by-speaker study of how incompatibility between two target systems is handled. We conclude that descriptions of mixed accents should be more common in the literature and approached on a feature-by-feature basis to help develop models of accent interference.caslpub3959pu

Articulatory-acoustic comparison of /u/

The following article appeared in Lawson, E., Stuart-Smith, J. & Rodger, L. (2019) A comparison of acoustic and articulatory parameters for the GOOSE vowel across British Isles Englishes. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 146(6), pp. 4363-4381 and may be found at https://doi.org/10.1121/1.5139215.This study quantifies vocalic variation that cannot be measured from the acoustic signal alone and develops methods of standardisation and measurement of articulatory parameters for vowels. Articulatory-acoustic variation in the GOOSE vowel was measured across three regional accents of the British Isles, using a total of eighteen speakers from the Republic of Ireland, Scotland and England, recorded with synchronous ultrasound tongue imaging, lip camera and audio. Single co-temporal measures were taken of tongue-body height and backness, lip protrusion, F1 and F2. After normalisation, mixed-effects modelling identified statistically-significant variation for region; tongue-body position was significantly higher and fronter for Irish and English speakers. Region was also significant for lip-protrusion measures, with Scottish speakers showing significantly smaller degrees of protrusion than English speakers. However, Region was only significant for acoustic height and not for frontness.Correlational analyses of all measures showed: a significant positive correlation between tongue-body height and acoustic height; a negative correlation between lip-protrusion and acoustic frontness; but no correlation between tongue-body frontness and acoustic frontness. Effectively, two distinct regional production strategies were found to result in similar normalised acoustic frontness measures for GOOSE: Scottish tongue-body positions were backer and lips less protruded, while English and Irish speakers had fronter tongue-body positions, but more protruded lips.https://doi.org/10.1121/1.5139215146pubpub