School of Languages and Linguistics - Research Publications

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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.