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

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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/.

  • 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:14 Dec 2024 01:36
    Related URLs:
    URI:https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/id/eprint/87519
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