Article published in:
Language Variation - European Perspectives V: Selected papers from the Seventh International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE 7), Trondheim, June 2013
Edited by Eivind Torgersen, Stian Hårstad, Brit Mæhlum and Unn Røyneland
[Studies in Language Variation 17] 2015
► pp. 225–238

A real-time study of plosives in Glaswegian using an automatic measurement algorithm

Change or age-grading?

This paper presents a collaborative study of variation and potential change in the voicing contrast in Scottish English plosives, analyzed in recordings from twelve vernacular female speakers of different generations made in the 1970s and the 2000s in Glasgow. We adapted an existing automatic measurement algorithm for predicting Voice Onset Time (VOT) originally developed for voiceless stops, for the analysis of voiced and voiceless plosives in casual sociolinguistic speech recordings of different kinds. Our semi-automatic method, which involved quick manual coding of automatically-generated positive VOT predictions, resulted in correct or close to correct measures for two-thirds of our data, and allowed us to process a very large number of tokens very quickly, especially for voiceless stops. The VOT results themselves indicate that the voicing contrast is being maintained, but suggest that a change in the phonetic realization of the stops may have been in progress since the middle of the 20th century, specifically a lengthening of aspiration for /p/ and /t/, and a trend to a longer release phase in their voiced counterparts.
Keywords: age grading, automatic measurement algorithm, Glasgow English, language change, real time study, Voice Onset Time
Published online: 09 April 2015
https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.17.17stu
Cited by

Cited by other publications

Chodroff, Eleanor & Colin Wilson
2017. Structure in talker-specific phonetic realization: Covariation of stop consonant VOT in American English. Journal of Phonetics 61 ► pp. 30 ff. Crossref logo

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