High Vowels in Southern British English: /u/-fronting Does Not Result in Merger

Ethnicity and Sound Change: African American English in Charleston, SC

This study investigates the degree to which African Americans participate in the sound changes currently in progress in the dialect of Charleston, South Carolina. It is based on a sample of 60 African Americans native to the area, recorded during sociolinguistic interviews; spontaneous speech is supplemented with word list reading and minimal-pair tests. The speech of 20 of the informants has b...

The contributions of the lips and the tongue to the diachronic fronting of high back vowels in Standard Southern British English

Recent acoustic studies have provided evidence that /u/ (GOOSE) and /U/ (FOOT) have fronted in the standard accent of England in the last fifty years, but what is less clear is whether this fronting is due entirely to a repositioning of the tongue or whether it has been accompanied by an unrounding of the lips. Four experiments were carried out to shed light on this issue. An acoustic study of ...

/u:/-fronting in Standard Southern British English: Testing the role of diphthongization with a computer simulation

/u/-Fronting in English speakers' L1 but not in their L2

This paper presents an acoustic analysis of the three corner vowels in the Diapix Foreign Language corpus (DIAPIX-FL) which contains material from English and Spanish native speakers from both their L1 and L2. We investigated how L1 vowel characteristics influence the production of L2 vowels, and to what extent a current sound change in one of the languages is reflected in the other. We find th...

Icphs Xvii Regular Session

This study reports on the acoustic properties of the front vowel /i/ and the fronted back vowel /u/ in Standard Southern British English (SSBE). These two vowels are realized with very similar (and for some tokens overlapping) values of F2, so that F2 does not seem to be a reliable acoustic cue for the distinction between the two vowels. To test further possible cues to the English front-back c...