Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-sxzjt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-19T17:24:40.564Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

What exactly is a front rounded vowel? An acoustic and articulatory investigation of the nurse vowel in South Wales English

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 March 2010

Robert Mayr
Robert Mayr*
Affiliation:
Centre for Speech and Language Therapy, University of Wales Institute, Cardiffrmayr@uwic.ac.uk
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Descriptive reports of South Wales English indicate front rounded realizations of the nurse vowel (e.g. Wells 1982; Collins & Mees 1990; Mees & Collins 1999; Walters 1999, 2001). However, the specific phonetic properties of the vowel are not depicted uniformly in these studies. In addition, they have relied entirely on auditory descriptions, rather than instrumental measurements. The study presented here is the first to provide a systematic acoustic and articulatory investigation of the nurse vowel in South Wales English, and to explore its relationship to realizations of Standard Southern British English /ɜː/ and Standard German /øː/. The results indicate systematic differences between the three vowels, with the South Wales English vowel produced with an open rounded lip posture, yet the acoustic characteristics of an unrounded front vowel. Implications for the notion of ‘front-rounding’ are discussed.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the International Phonetic Association , Volume 40 , Issue 1 , April 2010 , pp. 93 - 112
Copyright
Copyright © International Phonetic Association 2010

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

Andruski, Jean E. & Nearey, Terrance M.. 1992. On the sufficiency of compound target specification of isolated vowels in /bVb/ syllables. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 91 (1), 390–410.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Antoniadis, Zissis & Strube, Hans W.. 1984. Untersuchungen zur spezifischen Dauer deutscher Vokale. Phonetica 41 (1), 72–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Balasubramanian, T. 1981. Lip and jaw movements during the articulation of the vowels in Tamil. Journal of Phonetics 9 (2), 121–127.Google Scholar
Bekker, Ian. 2009. The vowels of South African English. Ph.D. dissertation, North-West University.Google Scholar
Boersma, Paul & Weenink, David. 2008. Praat: Doing phonetics by computer (version 5.0). http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/ (7 July 2008).Google Scholar
Catford, John C. 1988. A practical introduction to phonetics. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Chirrey, Deborah. 1999. Edinburgh: Descriptive material. In Foulkes & Docherty (eds.), 223–229.Google Scholar
Clark, Urszula. 2008. The English West Midlands: Phonology. In Kortmann et al. (eds.), 145–177.Google Scholar
Collins, Beverley & Mees, Inger M.. 1990. The phonetics of Cardiff English. In Coupland (ed.), 87–103.Google Scholar
Connolly, John H. 1981. On the segmental phonology of a South Wales accent of English. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 11 (1), 51–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Connolly, John H. 1990. Port Talbot English. In Coupland (ed.), 121–129.Google Scholar
Coupland, Nikolas. 1988. Dialect in use: Sociolinguistic variation in Cardiff English. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.Google Scholar
Coupland, Nikolas (ed.). 1990. English in Wales: Diversity, conflict and change. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
Cruttenden, Alan. 2008. Gimson's pronunciation dictionary of English, 7th edn. London: Hodder Education.Google Scholar
Deterding, David. 1990. Speaker normalization for automatic speech recognition. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cambridge.Google Scholar
Deterding, David. 1997. The formants of monophthongs in Standard Southern British English pronunciation. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 27 (1–2), 47–55.Google Scholar
Foulkes, Paul & Docherty, Gerard J. (eds.). 1999. Urban voices: Accent studies in the British Isles. London: Arnold.Google Scholar
Fromkin, Victoria. 1964. Lip positions in American English vowels. Language and Speech 7 (4), 215–225.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gendrot, Cédric & Adda-Decker, Martine. 2005. Impact of duration on F1/F2 formant values of oral vowels: An automatic analysis of large broadcast news corpora in French and German. 9th Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (INTERSPEECH 2005), Lisbon, Portugal, 2453–2456.Google Scholar
Harrington, Jonathan, Cox, Felicity & Evans, Zoe. 1997. An acoustic phonetic study of Broad, General and Cultivated Australian English vowels. Australian Journal of Linguistics 17 (2), 155–184.Google Scholar
Hawkins, Sarah & Midgley, Jonathan. 2005. Formant frequencies of RP monophthongs in four age groups of speakers. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 35 (2), 183–199.Google Scholar
Hickey, Raymond. 1999. Dublin English: Current changes and their motivation. In Foulkes & Docherty (eds.), 265–281.Google Scholar
Hoole, Philip & Kroos, Christian. 1998. Control of larynx height in vowel production. 5th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP '98), Sydney, paper 1097.Google Scholar
House, Arthur S. 1961. On vowel duration in English. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 33 (9), 1174–1178.Google Scholar
IPA (International Phonetic Association). 1999. Handbook of the International Phonetic Association: A guide to the use of the International Phonetic Alphabet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Jørgensen, Hans P. 1969. Die gespannten und ungespannten Vokale in der norddeutschen Hochsprache mit einer spezifischen Untersuchung der Struktur ihrer Formantenfrequenzen [The tense and lax vowels in the North German standard language with a specific investigation of the structure of their formant frequencies]. Phonetica 19 (4), 217–245.Google Scholar
Knowles, Gerald. 1973. Scouse: The urban dialect of Liverpool. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Leeds.Google Scholar
Knowles, Gerald. 1978. The nature of phonological variables in Scouse. InTrudgill, Peter (ed.), Sociolinguistic patterns in British English, 80–90. London: Arnold.Google Scholar
Kortmann, Bernd, Upton, Clive & Schneider, Edgar W. (eds.). 2008. Varieties of English, vol. 1: The British Isles. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Labov, William. 1964. Stages in the acquisition of Standard English. In Shuy, Roger W., Davis, Alva L. & Hogan, Robert F. (eds.), Social dialects and language learning, 77–103. Champaign, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.Google Scholar
Laing, Margaret & Lass, Roger. 2005. Are front rounded vowels retained in West Midland Middle English? In Ritt, Nikolaus & Schendl, Herbert (eds.), Rethinking Middle English: Linguistic and literary approaches, 280–290. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Lass, Roger. 1989. System-shape and the eternal return: Front rounded vowels in English. Folia Linguistica Historia 10 (1–2), 163–198.Google Scholar
Lass, Roger. 1990. A ‘standard’ South African vowel system. In Ramsaran, Susan (ed.), Studies in the pronunciation of English: A commemorative volume in honour of A. C. Gimson, 272–285. London & New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Lass, Roger. 1992. Front rounded vowels in Old English. In Colman, Fran (ed.), Evidence for Old English: Material and theoretical bases for reconstruction, 88–116. Edinburgh: John Donald.Google Scholar
Lass, Roger. 2004. South African English. In Hickey, Raymond (ed.), Legacies of colonial English: Studies in transported dialects, 363–386. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Laver, John. 1980. The phonetic description of voice quality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Laver, John. 1994. Principles of phonetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Linker, Wendy J. 1982. Articulatory and acoustic correlates of labial activity in vowels: A cross-linguistic study. UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics, paper No. 56. http://escholarship.org/uc/item/0wq546xq (17 November 2008).Google Scholar
Maddieson, Ian. 2008. Front rounded vowels. In Haspelmath, Martin, Dryer, Matthew S., Gil, David & Comrie, Bernard (eds.), The world atlas of language structures online. Munich: Max Plank Digital Library, chapter 11. http://wals.info/feature/description/11 (31 January 2009).Google Scholar
Maguire, Warren. 2008. What is a merger, and can it be reversed? The origin, status, and reversal of the ‘NURSE–NORTH merger’ in Tyneside English. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Newcastle upon Tyne.Google Scholar
Maurer, Dieter, Cook, Norman, Landis, Theodor & D'Heureuse, Christian. 1992. Are measured differences between the formants of men, women and children due to F0 differences? Journal of the International Phonetic Association 21 (2), 66–79.Google Scholar
Mees, Inger M. & Collins, Beverley. 1999. Cardiff: A real-time study of glottalization. In Foulkes & Docherty (eds.), 185–202.Google Scholar
Mooshammer, Christine & Geng, Christian. 2008. Acoustic and articulatory manifestations of vowel reduction in German. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 38 (2), 117–136.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morrison, Geoffrey S. & Nearey, Terrance M.. 2007. Testing theories of vowel inherent spectral change. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 122 (1), EL15–EL22.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Newbrook, Mark. 1999. West Wirral: Norms, self-reports, and usage. In Foulkes & Docherty (eds.), 90–106.Google Scholar
Parry, David. 1977. The survey of Anglo-Welsh dialects, vol. 1: The South-East. Swansea: University College.Google Scholar
Parry, David. 1979. The survey of Anglo-Welsh dialects, vol. 2: The South-West. Swansea: University College.Google Scholar
Parry, David. 1990a. The conservative English dialects of North Carmarthenshire. In Coupland (ed.), 142–150.Google Scholar
Parry, David. 1990b. The conservative English dialects of South Pembrokeshire. In Coupland (ed.), 151–161.Google Scholar
Penhallurick, Robert. 2008. Welsh English: Phonology. In Kortmann et al. (eds.), 105–121.Google Scholar
Pols, L. C. W., Tromp, H. R. C. & Plomp, R. 1973. Frequency analysis of Dutch vowels from 50 male speakers. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 53 (4), 1093–1101.Google Scholar
Raphael, Lawrence J., Bell-Berti, Fredericka, Collier, René & Baer, Thomas. 1979. Tongue position in rounded and unrounded front vowel pairs. Language and Speech 22 (1), 37–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shaiman, Susan, Adams, Scott G. & Kimelman, Mikael D. Z.. 1995. Timing relationships of the upper lip and jaw across changes in speaking rate. Journal of Phonetics 23 (1–2), 119–128.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Strange, Winifred, Bohn, Ocke-Schwen, Trent, Sonja A. & Nishi, Kanae. 2004. Acoustic and perceptual similarity of North German and American English vowels. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 115 (4), 1791–1807.Google Scholar
Strauss-Hough, Monica & Klich, Rich J.. 1999. Phrase context effects on lip EMG activity during vowel production in apraxia of speech. Journal of Medical Speech-Language Pathology 7 (2), 145–153.Google Scholar
Stuart-Smith, Jane. 1999. Glasgow: Accent and voice quality. In Foulkes & Docherty (eds.), 203–222.Google Scholar
Stuart-Smith, Jane. 2008. The phonology of Scottish English. In Kortmann et al. (eds.), 47–67.Google Scholar
Sudbury, Andrea. 2001. Falkland Islands English: A Southern Hemisphere variety. English World-Wide 22 (1), 55–80.Google Scholar
Sweet, Henry. 1877. A handbook of phonetics. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Tench, Paul. 1990. The pronunciation of English in Abercrave. In Coupland (ed.), 130–141.Google Scholar
Trudgill, Peter. 2004. New-dialect formation: The inevitability of colonial Englishes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Walters, Rod. 1999. A study of the segmental and suprasegmental phonology of Rhondda Valleys English. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Glamorgan. http://resnt1.isd.glam.ac.uk/rhondda_valleys_english/ (9 November 2009).Google Scholar
Walters, Rod. 2001. English in Wales and a ‘Welsh Valleys’ accent. World Englishes 20 (3), 285–304.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Walters, Rod. 2003. ‘Celtic English’: Influences on a South Wales Valleys accent. English World-Wide 24 (1), 63–87.Google Scholar
Watson, Kevin. 2007. Liverpool English. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 37 (3), 351–360.Google Scholar
Watt, Dominic. 1996. Out of the frying pan into the fire: Remerger of Tyneside (ɜ)? Newcastle and Durham Working Papers in Linguistics 4, 299–314.Google Scholar
Watt, Dominic & Milroy, Lesley. 1999. Patterns of variation and change in three Newcastle vowels: Is this dialect levelling? In Foulkes & Docherty (eds.), 25–46.Google Scholar
Watt, Dominic & Tillotson, Jennifer. 2001. A spectrographic analysis of vowel fronting in Bradford English. English World-Wide 22 (2), 269–302.Google Scholar
Wells, John C. 1982. Accents of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Whitworth, Nicole. 2003. Bilingual acquisition of speech timing: Aspects of rhythm production by German–English families. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Leeds.Google Scholar
Williams, Ann & Kerswill, Paul. 1999. Dialect levelling: Change and continuity in Milton Keynes, Reading and Hull. In Foulkes & Docherty (eds.), 141–162.Google Scholar
Wood, Sidney. 1986. The acoustical significance of tongue, lip and larynx maneuvers in rounded palatal vowels. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 80 (2), 391–401.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed