Phonetics of White Hmong vowel and tonal contrasts

Hmong languages, particularly White Hmong, are well studied for their complex tone systems that incorporate pitch, phonation, and duration differences. Still, prior work has made use mostly of tones elicited in their citation forms in carrier phrases. In this paper, we provide a detailed description of both the vowel and tone systems of White Hmong from recordings of read speech. We confirm several features of the language, including the presence of nasal vowels (rather than derived nasalized vowels through coarticulation with a coda [ŋ]), the description of certain tone contours, and the systematic presence of breathy and creaky voice on two of the tones. We also find little evidence of additional intonational f0 targets. However, we show that some tones vary greatly by their position in utterance, and propose novel descriptions for several of them. Finally, we show that $\textrm{H}1^{\!*}$ –H2*, a widely used measure of voice quality and phonation in Hmong and across languages, does not adequately distinguish modal from non-modal phonation in this data set, and argue that noise measures like Cepstral Peak Prominence (CPP) are more robust to phonation differences in corpora with more variability.

Using Crowd-Sourced Speech Data to Study Socially Constrained Variation in Nonmodal Phonation

This study examines the status of nonmodal phonation (e.g. breathy and creaky voice) in British English using smartphone recordings from over 2,500 speakers. With this novel data collection method, it uncovers effects that have not been reported in past work, such as a relationship between speakers’ education and their production of nonmodal phonation. The results also confirm that previous findings on nonmodal phonation, including the greater use of creaky voice by male speakers than female speakers, extend to a much larger and more diverse sample than has been considered previously. This confirmation supports the validity of using crowd-sourced data for phonetic analyses. The acoustic correlates that were examined include fundamental frequency, H1*-H2*, cepstral peak prominence, and harmonic-to-noise ratio.

Podcaster Prosody

This paper addresses the style-shifting of podcast host Sarah Koenig, specifically in her use of utterance final creaky voice in different contexts. I find that Koenig uses more creaky voice on her podcast Serial than in an interview context. Additionally, her creaky voice in the interview occurs in specific contexts related to her work as a journalist. Based on analyses of how phonetic features can construct certain personae, I argue that Koenig may be designing her speech to construct a journalistic persona with her use of creaky voice.

Perceptions of T-glottalling among adolescents in South East England

Sociolinguistic research has established that glottal realisations of the voiceless alveolar stop /t/ have become increasingly common in accents of British English. The phenomenon, known as T-glottalling, encompasses the production of word-final and word-medial /t/ using glottal articulations, including creaky voice, pre-glottalisation [ʔt] and glottal replacement [ʔ] (Straw & Patrick, 2007), so that words such as but [bʌt] and butter [bʌtə] may become [bʌʔ] and [bʌʔə] respectively. The change has been documented for some time in Scotland (Macafee, 1997) and Norfolk (Trudgill, 1999) but has since been reported in numerous locations across the UK (see Smith & Holmes–Elliott, 2018 for a recent review). Studies of regional dialect levelling (Kerswill, 2003) have argued that T-glottalling has spread from working-class London speech into neighbouring varieties of South East England and beyond as a form of geographical diffusion (Altendorf & Watt, 2004). Together with other variables showing similar sociolinguistic patterns, such as TH-fronting and L vocalisation, it has been identified as part of a set of ‘youth norms’ used by young people in many urban centres to index a trendy, youthful identity (Williams & Kerswill, 1999; Milroy, 2007; though see Watson, 2006 for an exception in Liverpool), which have elsewhere been referred to as ‘Estuary English’ (Rosewarne, 1984; Altendorf, 2017). In terms of perception, T-glottalling is described as highly salient and stigmatised, frequently attracting comments from lay speakers to the effect that it should be avoided (Wells, 1982; Bennett, 2012), to the extent that mainstream journalistic publications can identify and criticise its use by ‘educated’ speakers such as politicians (e.g. Littlejohn, 2011).

Talking about intercultural experiences

The aim of this paper is to ask how exchange students retrospectively co-construct their first ‘culture shock’ experiences on a verbal, vocal, and visual plane. The results show that the different co-occurring levels of communication in the talk of the students offer various insights into cognitive processes: (1) Metaphorical and metonymical gestures are frequently used to represent or compress cultural dimensions in moments of high involvement and emphatic speech style. (2) Such gestures are also often historically and culturally embedded and may additionally serve to gain laughter from the co-participants in order to exaggerate the effect of cultural confrontation, underpinned by the use of prosodic cues. (3) Other prosodic means such as creaky voice may be used as a metaphorical marker for distance and represent therefore another type of cultural shock marker. (4) A dynamic understanding of blending theory might be a tool for laying cognitive processes of intercultural experiences open for the researcher.