Dr Tamara Rathcke from the Department of English Language & Linguistics has co-written an article in Laboratory Phonology, the journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology (LabPhon).
LabPhon is a non-profit organisation promoting the scientific study of the phonologies of diverse languages, especially through use of quantitative and laboratory methods.
Tamara co-wrote the article entitled ‘The Private Life of Stops: VOT in a Real-Time Corpus of Spontaneous Glaswegian’ with Professor Jane Stuart-Smith (Glasgow University); Morgan Sonderegger (McGill University) and Dr Rachel Macdonald (Glasgow University).
Voice Onset Time (VOT) is the length of time between the end of a stop consonant, such as [p] or [t], and the onset of the next speech sound. While VOT is known to be sensitive to a range of phonetic and linguistic factors, much less is known about the phenomena in spontaneous speech, since most studies consider stops in single words, sentences, and/or in read speech. Scottish English is typically said to show less aspirated voiceless stops than other varieties of English, but there is also variation, ranging from un-aspirated stops in vernacular speakers to more aspirated stops in Scottish Standard English; change in the vernacular has also been suggested.
This paper presents results from a study which used a fast, semi-automated procedure for analysing positive VOT, and applied it to stressed syllable-initial stops from a real- and apparent-time corpus of naturally-occurring spontaneous Glaswegian vernacular speech. It confirms significant effects on VOT for place of articulation and local speaking rate, and trends for vowel height and lexical frequency. Overall, the findings presented in the paper suggest that VOT in both voiceless and voiced stops is lengthening over the course of the twentieth century in this variety of Scottish English. They also support observations from other studies, both from Scotland and beyond, indicating that gradient shifts along the VOT continuum reflect subtle sociolinguistic control.
Further information about the paper can be found at: www.degruyter.com/view/j/labphon.2015.6.issue-3-4/lp-2015-0015/lp-2015-0015.xml