Lenition and fortition of /r/ in utterance-final position, an ultrasound tongue imaging study of lingual gesture timing in spontaneous speech

Lawson, Eleanor and Stuart-Smith, Jane (2021) Lenition and fortition of /r/ in utterance-final position, an ultrasound tongue imaging study of lingual gesture timing in spontaneous speech. Journal of Phonetics, 86. 101053. ISSN 0095-4470 (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2021.101053)

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Abstract

The most fundamental division in English dialects is the rhotic/non-rhotic division. The mechanisms of historical /r/-loss sound change are not well understood, but studying a contemporary /r/-loss sound change in a rhotic variety of English can provide new insights. We know that /r/ weakening in contemporary Scottish English is a gesture-timing based phenomenon and that it is socially indexical, but we have no phonetic explanation for the predominance of weak /r/ variants in utterance-final position. Using a socially-stratified conversational ultrasound tongue imaging speech corpus, this study investigates the effects of boundary context, along with other linguistic and social factors such as syllable stress, following-consonant place and social class, on lingual gesture timing in /r/ and strength of rhoticity. Mixed-effects modelling identified that utterance-final context conditions greater anterior lingual gesture delay in /r/ and weaker-sounding /r/s, but only in working-class speech. Middle-class speech shows no anterior lingual gesture delay for /r/ in utterance-final position and /r/ is audibly strengthened in this position. It is unclear whether this divergence is due to variation in underlying tongue shape for /r/ in these social-class communities, or whether utterance-final position provides a key location for the performance of social class using salient variants of /r/.

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Item type:	Article
ID code:	87519
Dates:	Date Event 1 May 2021 Published 15 April 2021 Published Online 17 March 2021 Accepted 9 March 2020 Submitted
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Subjects:	Language and Literature > Philology. Linguistics
Department:	Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (HaSS) > Psychological Sciences and Health > Speech and Language Therapy
Depositing user:	Pure Administrator
Date deposited:	06 Dec 2023 09:45
Last modified:	09 Apr 2024 04:27
Related URLs:	https://eprints.gla.ac.uk/242796/
URI:	https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/id/eprint/87519

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