School of Languages and Linguistics - Research Publications

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    An Acoustic Study of Bininj Gun-Wok Medial Stop Consonants
    STOAKES, HM ; FLETCHER, J ; Butcher, (UNIVERSITY OF SAARLAND, 2007)
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    SPECTRAL AND DURATIONAL PROPERTIES OF VOWELS IN KUNWINJKU
    FLETCHER, J ; STOAKES, HM ; LOAKES, D ; Butcher, (UNIVERSITY OF SAARLAND, 2007)
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    (Mis)perceiving /el/ ~ /æl/ in Melbourne English: a micro-analysis of sound perception and change
    Loakes, DEL ; Hajek, JTH ; Fletcher, JF (Australasian Speech Science and Technology Australia (ASSTA), 2010)
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    A Blueprint for a Comprehensive Australian English Auditory-Visual Speech Corpus
    Burnham, D ; Ambikairajah, E ; Arciuli, J ; Bennamoun, M ; Best, CT ; Bird, S ; Butcher, AR ; Cassidy, S ; Chetty, G ; Cox, FM ; Cutler, A ; Dale, R ; Epps, JR ; Fletcher, JM ; Goecke, R ; Grayden, DB ; Hajek, JT ; Ingram, JC ; Ishihara, S ; Kemp, N ; Kinoshita, Y ; Kuratate, T ; Lewis, TW ; Loakes, DE ; Onslow, M ; Powers, DM ; Rose, P ; Togneri, R ; Tran, D ; Wagner, M (Cascadilla Press, 2009)
    Contemporary speech science is driven by the availability of large, diverse speech corpora. Such infrastructure underpins research and technological advances in various practical, socially beneficial and economically fruitful endeavours, from ASR to hearing prostheses. Unfortunately, speech corpora are not easy to come by because they are both expensive to collect and are not favoured by the usual funding sources as their collection per se does not fall under the classification of ‘research’. Nevertheless they provide the sine qua non for many avenues of research endeavour in speech science. The only publicly available Australian speech corpus is the 12-year-old Australian National Database of Spoken Language (ANDOSL) database (see http://andosl.anu.edu.au/; Millar, Dermody, Harrington, & Vonwillar, 1990), which is now outmoded due to its small number of participants, just a single recording session per speaker, low fidelity, audio-only rather than AV data, its lack of disordered speech, and limited coverage of indigenous and ethnocultural Australian English (AusE) variants. There are more up-to-date UK and US English language corpora, but these are mostly audio-only, and use of these for AusE purposes is not optimal, and results in inaccuracies.
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    Interpreting rising intonation in Australian English
    Fletcher, J ; Loakes, D (University of Illinois Press, 2010-01-01)
    Australian English is referred to widely as a rising variety of English due to the prevalence of rising tunes in interactive discourse. Australian English subjects were required to listen to a series of rising stimuli that varied in terms of pitch level and pitch span and were asked whether they heard a question or statement. The results showed that both rise span and pitch level of the rise elbow influenced the pattern of responses. If both were relatively high, subjects were most likely to interpret the rise as a question, with fewer question responses when the rise elbow was relatively low and the pitch span narrow. The results provide limited evidence for two simple rises in Australian English, but also confirm a high level of phonetic gradience amongst rising tunes in this variety.
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    The acoustic characteristics of diphthongs in Indian English
    Maxwell, O ; Fletcher, J (Wiley, 2010-01-01)
    This paper presents the results of an acoustic analysis of English diphthongs produced by three L1 speakers of Hindi and four L1 speakers of Punjabi. Formant trajectories of rising and falling diphthongs (i.e., vowels where there is a clear rising or falling trajectory through the F1/F2 vowel space) were analysed in a corpus of citation-form words. In line with previous research, the diphthong inventory included six different diphthongs and a long monophthongal vowel [OI] in place of/partial derivative U/in GOAT; however, none of the speakers produced a full set of diphthong vowels. In addition, the/eI/diphthong, as in FACE, and the/U partial derivative/diphthong, as in TOUR, had both monophthongal and diphthongal realizations depending on the speaker. Overall, there was a great deal of variation in diphthong realization across the corpus but L1 appeared to be a relevant factor. Punjabi speakers showed a wider range of phonetic realizations for some of the vowels, and were more likely to produce long monophthongs rather than diphthongs. The results also highlight differences in the phonetic characteristics of several diphthongs between the speakers of two language backgrounds. The results of this study therefore contribute to the debate on the phonemic representation of IE vowels by taking into account different L1 influence (i.e., Hindi or Punjabi).
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    Big words, small phrases: Mismatches between pause units and the polysynthetic word in Dalabon
    EVANS, N ; FLETCHER, J ; ROSS, BB (Mouton de Gruyter, 2008)
    This article uses instrumental data from natural speech to examine the phenomenon of pause placement within the verbal word in Dalabon, a polysynthetic Australian language of Arnhem Land. Though the phenomenon is incipient and in two sample texts occurs in only around 4% of verbs, there are clear possibilities for interrupting the grammatical word by pause after the pronominal prefix and some associated material at the left edge, though these within-word pauses are significantly shorter, on average, than those between words. Within-word pause placement is not random, but is restricted to certain affix boundaries; it requires that the paused-after material be at least dimoraic, and that the remaining material in the verbal word be at least disyllabic. Bininj Gun-wok, another polysynthetic language closely related to Dalabon, does not allow pauses to interrupt the verbal word, and the Dalabon development appears to be tied up with certain morphological innovations that have increased the proportion of closed syllables in the pronominal prefix zone of the verb. Though only incipient and not yet phonologized, pause placement in Dalabon verbs suggests a phonology-driven route by which polysynthetic languages may ultimately become less morphologically complex by fracturing into smaller units.