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This article explores an instance of dialect levelling in South East England, the reversal of Cockney diphthong shift. We trace this reversal through an apparent-time analysis of 52 speakers from Debden, a community in Essex with East London heritage. Dynamic vowel analyses of word-list and passage data suggests a reversal of the diphthong shift towards SSBE targets which has occurred most abruptly in those born after 1992 potentially as a result of increased social mobility in this generation. We compare the results in Debden to previous findings in the south-eastern towns of Milton Keynes and Reading where apparent-time change was also observed away from a shifted vowel system and towards SSBE targets (Kerswill & Williams 2000, 2005). In diverse areas of South East England, a common process of levelling towards the pan-regional standard is present which is not occurring exclusively as a result of dialect contact or face-to-face interaction. Nonetheless, each community exhibits a distinct trajectory and timing of language change which can be attributed to different patterns of movement and resettlement and, in particular, access to social mobility and the retention of community networks.

This paper presents acoustic and articulatory (ultrasound) data on vowel reduction in Polish. The analysis focuses on the question of whether the change in formant value in unstressed vowels can be explained by duration-driven undershoot alone or whether there is also evidence for additional stress-specific articulatory mechanisms that systematically affect vowel formants. On top of the expected durational differences between the stressed and unstressed conditions, the duration is manipulated by inducing changes in the speech rate. The observed vowel formants are compared to expected formants derived from the articulatory midsagittal tongue data in different conditions. The results show that the acoustic vowel space is reduced in size and raised in unstressed vowels compared to stressed vowels. Most of the spectral reduction can be explained by reduced vowel duration, but there is also an additional systematic effect of F1-lowering in unstressed non-high vowels that does not follow from tongue movement. The proposed interpretation is that spectral vowel reduction in Polish behaves largely as predicted by the undershoot model of vowel reduction, but the effect of undershoot is enhanced for low unstressed vowels, potentially by a stress marking strategy which involves raising the fundamental frequency.

It has been hypothesized that morphologically-complex words are mentally stored in a decomposed form, often requiring online composition during processing. Morphologically-simple words can only be stored as a whole. The way a word is stored and retrieved is thought to influence its realization during speech production, so that when retrieval requires less time, the articulatory plan is executed faster. Faster articulatory execution could result in more coarticulation. Accordingly, we hypothesized that morphologically-simple words might be produced with more coarticulation than apparently homophonous morphologically-complex words, because the retrieval of monomorphemic forms is direct, in contrast to morphologically-complex ones, which might need to be composed online into full word forms. Using Ultrasound Tongue Imaging, we tested this hypothesis with nine speakers of Scottish English. Over two days of training, participants learned phonemically identical monomorphemic and morphologically-complex nonce words, while on the third consecutive testing day, they produced them in two prosodic contexts. Two types of articulatory analyses revealed no systematic differences in coarticulation between monomorphemic and morphologically-complex items, yet a few speakers did idiosyncratically produce some morphological effects on articulation. Our work contributes to our understanding of how morphologically complex words are stored and processed during speech production.

In this paper, we present a novel computational approach to the analysis of accent variation. The case study is dialect levelling in the North of England, manifested as reduction of accent variation across the North and emergence of General Northern English (GNE), a pan-regional standard accent associated with middle-class speakers. We investigated this instance of dialect levelling using random forest classification, with audio data from a crowd-sourced corpus of 105 urban, mostly highly-educated speakers from five northern UK cities: Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle upon Tyne and Sheffield. We trained random forest models to identify individual northern cities from a sample of other northern accents, based on first two formant measurements of full vowel systems. We tested the models using unseen data. We relied on undersampling, bagging (bootstrap aggregation) and leave-one-out cross-validation to address some challenges associated with the data set, such as unbalanced data and relatively small sample size. The accuracy of classification provides us with a measure of relative similarity between different pairs of cities, while calculating conditional feature importance allows us to identify which input features (which vowels and which formants) have the largest influence in the prediction. We do find a considerable degree of levelling, especially between Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield, although some differences persist. The features that contribute to these differences most systematically are typically not the ones discussed in previous dialect descriptions. We propose that the most systematic regional features are also not salient, and as such, they serve as sociolinguistic regional indicators. We supplement the random forest results with a more traditional variationist description of by-city vowel systems, and we use both sources of evidence to inform a description of the vowels of General Northern English.

It is uncontroversial that morphological processes can change phonological surface representations. However, some empirical evidence also suggests that morphological processes may trigger phonetically gradient processes, that is, processes that involve fine phonetic differences, but involve no change in phonological categories. Such findings challenge modular or discrete feedforward theories of grammatical architecture, which counterpredict direct interactions between morphology and phonetics. This article reviews some of the findings in this area, pointing to two types of difficulty in interpreting evidence of morphologically-conditioned phonetic gradience. The first one involves significance and replicability in experimental sciences, which become especially problematic when fine phonetic detail is examined and the magnitude of differences involved is very small. The second one concerns identifying what is causing the phonetic effects among a wealth of possibilities, including paradigmatic relationships, morphological structure, prosody, and informativity.

The fronting of the two high-back vowels /u:/ and /U/ in Southern British English is very well documented, but mainly in the acoustic domain. This paper presents articulatory (ultrasound) data, comparing the relative tongue position of these vowels in fronting and non-fronting consonantal contexts, i.e. preceding a coronal consonant (food, foot) and preceding a coda /l/ (fool, full ). Particular attention is paid to the comparison between articulatory results and corresponding acoustic measurements of F2 in both vowels. Results show thatthe average dierences between food and foot and their dynamic proles are similar in articulation and acoustics. In /u:l/ sequences (fool ), tongue position is more advanced than could be inferred from its low F2. In addition, even though the tongues position in fool and full is clearly distinct, there is no comparable corresponding dierence in F2. This suggests that the common articulatory metaphor that characterises F2 increase as fronting must be used cautiously. In the case of English high-back vowel fronting, special attention must bepaid to the anking consonants when estimating vowel distances. This paper also provides specic recommendations for recording and analysing ultrasound data in research on vowel variation and change.

While some sound changes occur in environments defined in purely phonological terms, others may become sensitive to morphological boundaries. In this paper, we investigate the phonetic nature of this latter diachronic development: does it happen through small gradient increments, or is there a categorical shift from one allophone to another? We focus on GOOSE-fronting and /l/-darkening in Southern British English, the interaction of which is sensitive to morphological boundaries. Relatively retracted realisations of the vowel and dark realisations of the /l/ appear before a morpheme boundary, even when a vowel follows (e.g. fool-ing), whereas in monomorphemic words (e.g. hula), there is more /u:/-fronting, and the /l/ is relatively lighter. We analyse the phonetic realisation of such pairs as hula vs. fool-ing in 20 speakers of Southern British English using both acoustic and articulatory (ultrasound) instrumental methods. All the speakers express the morphological contrast in some way, although effect sizes vary dramatically. For some speakers, the contrast involves subtle articulatory differences without any clear acoustic consequences, whereas other speakers show robust differences employing multiple phonetic correlates. We therefore argue that the hula~fool-ing contrast would be misrepresented if analysed in terms of a small number of either /u:/ or /l/ allophonic categories. Instead, we interpret the results as supporting the predictions of phonological frameworks that incorporate phonetically gradient morphologisation.

In Central Catalan, word-final sibilants and stop + sibilant clusters undergo voicing when followed by a vowel in the next word. In word-final pre-vocalic singleton stops, however, no voicing is observed. This asymmetry is unexpected from the point of view of phonetic naturalness, and it invites a closer empirical investigation, especially in the light of recent phonetic findings which challenge earlier descriptions of a similar voicing process before sonorant consonants in Catalan. This study presents a systematic acoustic comparison of voicing in pre-vocalic stops /p, b/, sibilants /s, z/ and stop + sibilant clusters /bz/ with voicing before obstruents and before sonorant consonants. The results show that while pre-sonorant voicing is limited and highly variable, pre-vocalic sibilant and cluster voicing are both robust categorical processes for most speakers. Drawing on evidence from how voicing is realised in a subset of gradient cases, I propose that pre-vocalic cluster voicing developed from pre-vocalic sibilant voicing which in turn descended from an earlier intervocalic voicing process. I further question whether the outcome of the sound changes in Catalan can be synchronically analysed using grounded markedness constraints, and to what extent the pre-vocalic voicing may be regulated by universal vs. language-specific mechanisms of phonological abstraction.

The fronting of the high-back, /u:/ and /ʊ/, as currently seen in Southern British English, is a rare opportunity to study two similar sound changes at different stages of their phonetic development: /u:/-fronting is a more advanced change than /ʊ/-fronting. Since the fronting in both vowels is restricted from applying before a following final /l/, e.g. in words like fool or pull, we can exploit the difference in the phonetic advancement of /u:/ and /ʊ/-fronting to illuminate the nature of `fuzzy contrasts', affecting vowel+/l/ sequences in morphologically complex words. As recent results show that /u:/-fronting is partially limited in fool-ing (but not in monomorphemes like hula), we ask whether similar morphological constraints affect /ʊ/ followed by /l/ (e.g. bully vs. pull-ing). Simultaneously, we consider the question of what phonological generalisation best captures the interaction between vowel fronting, /l/-darkening, and morphological structure. We present ultrasound data from 20 speakers of SBE representing two age groups. The data show that morphologically conditioned contrasts are consistent for /u:/+/l/, but variable and limited in size for /ʊ/+/l/. We relate these findings to the debate on morphology-phonetics interactions and the emergence of phonological abstraction.Keywords: fuzzy contrasts; ultrasound; Goose-fronting; Foot-fronting; /l/-darkening;apparent time

This paper presents new experimental data on Quito Spanish /s/-voicing, which has attracted considerable interest from theoretical phonologists owing to the overapplication of voicing to word-final pre-vocalic /s/. Bermúdez-Otero (2011) singles out Quito /s/-voicing as an important test case for discriminating between two competing theories of phonology–morphosyntax interactions: Output–output correspondence and cyclicity. Overapplication in /s/-voicing cannot be captured using correspondence relationship to a base form, which challenges Output–output correspondence as a theory of opacity. However, the argument only holds insofar as word-final pre-vocalic /s/-voicing is considered phonological, as Output–output correspondence can account for /s/-voicing assuming that it only applies in the phonetics (Colina 2009). We discuss the diverging empirical predictions concerning categoricity and gradience in the surface realisation of voicing processes. We further test these predictions based on acoustic data from seven speakers of Quito Spanish. Evidence from speech rate manipulations shows that some speakers produce more voicing during frication at normal speech rate, compared to fast, maintaining a stable voicing ratio across different speech rates. We argue that for these speakers, /s/-voicing is optional but categorical, and so it ought to be analysed as phonological. This result presents a challenge to the Output–output correspondence approach, but can be accommodated within cyclicity.

Word-final consonants in Spanish are commonly assumed to undergo resyllabification across a word boundary before a following vowel, e.g., /los#otros/ 'the others' is realised as [lo.so.tros]. However, in many dialects of Spanish, word-final pre-vocalic consonants (‘derived onsets’) pattern phonologically with canonical codas and distinctly from canonical onsets. This property of derived onsets has been the subject of much interest in the phonological literature, and has led some linguists to question whether resyllabification indeed applies in all Spanish dialects. In this paper, we evaluate evidence for resyllabification based on acoustic data from 11 speakers of Peninsular Spanish. The results show that word-final pre-vocalic /s/ has increased duration compared to coda /s/, but at the same time, it is shorter compared to word-initial or word-medial pre-vocalic /s/. This result challenges an analysis where derived onsets become phonologically indistinguishable from canonical onsets. We consider an alternative in the form of partial resyllabification, and we further discuss the role of the syllable as a relevant unit in explaining /s/-sandhi in Spanish.

Final devoicing and regressive voice assimilation have been reported to apply to obstruents in word-final obstruent+sonorant clusters in Polish. This phenomenon, interpreted as a case of sonorant transparency in generative phonological analyses of Polish voicing, has sparked a number of attempts to reconcile the transparency generalisation with phonological characteristics of other laryngeal processes in Polish. This paper formulates some predictions concerning the surface realisation of underlying voicing values that follow from the sonorant transparency hypothesis, and reports on a production experiment designed to test these predictions. Results show, contrary to the descriptive and theoretical literature, that word-final sonorants typically block final devoicing and voice assimilation. The minority of cases where voicing and devoicing appear to apply as predicted by transparency are analysed using mixed-effects modelling, with a view to determining what factors influence their occurrence. Based on the results it is argued that apparent transparency cases are best explained as resulting from an interaction of phonological, phonetic and lexical factors, including manner of articulation, segmental duration, prosodic boundary, and word size, which are known to affect the probability of vocal fold vibration, and that systematic phonetic variation found in the data does not support the hypothesis that sonorants are transparent to laryngeal processes.

This article reports on an acoustic study of voicing in obstruents followed by a sonorant across a word boundary in two dialects of Dutch: East- and West- Flemish. In both varieties only gradient phonetic voicing was typically found in word- nal stops when a sonorant followed in the next word. In addition, West- Flemish showed optional categorical voicing in word- nal pre-sonorant fricatives. The voicing of fricatives is argued to be phonological, as it extends beyond the scope of automated coarticulation, and as the data pattern to form a distinct phonetic voicing target. However, the phonetic results do not support the hy- pothesis that West-Flemish sonorants are laryngeally speci ed, and thus able to spread voicing to neighbouring fricatives. Instead, fricative voicing is proposed to be an optional positional realisation in West-Flemish. Although the process cannot be directly motivated by reference to the phonological speci cations of the segments surrounding its target, it makes sense in terms of perceptual fac- tors leading to diachronic reanalysis. The West-Flemish positional variation may arise when partially voiced fricatives are perceived and subsequently reanalysed as categorically voiced by listeners, as proposed by Jansen (2004). It is further argued that fricatives are more likely than stops to be reinterpreted as voiced, as additional acoustic cues prevent voiced percepts in passively voiced stops.

Laryngeal contrast in European Portuguese has typically been described in the phonological literature in terms of an opposition between [+voice] and [–voice]. However, a number of phonetic studies have revealed that lenis fricatives in European Portuguese tend not to exhibit consistent, robust voicing. Focusing on the sibilant system, this paper has a three-fold goal. Firstly, we present results of a phonetic study designed to test the realisation of sibilants both in contrast and neutralisation contexts. Secondly, we propose a reanalysis of synchronic laryngeal contrast couched in the laryngeal realist tradition. Our claim is that an analysis in which fortis fricatives are specified for [spread glottis] makes more accurate phonetic predictions than alternative approaches. Our analysis entails the secondary claim that European Portuguese exemplifies what we term a hybrid voicing system : whilst [spread glottis] is the key contrast feature for the fricative series, the stop series can be best handled by assuming that lenis stops are specified for [voice]. Thirdly, we develop a possible diachronic scenario for how such a hybrid system may have emerged diachronically as the result of phonological changes the history Portuguese.

The FOOT and STRUT lexical sets did not undergo ahistorical split in the North of England, and thesevowels are said to remain a single phoneme forpresent day Northern English speakers. However,several sources report variation in this respect. Weanalyse this variation in production, using acousticanalysis of crowdsourced data from 141 speakers ofseven Northern English urban dialects. 36 speakersin our sample show a categorical distinction betweenFOOT and STRUT. Highly mobile speakers are morelikely to have this distinction, compared to speakers with low mobility. A categorical split is alsomore likely in speakers from Newcastle, comparedto several other cities. While we find no evidencethat FOOT and STRUT vowels are splitting in theNorth, we discuss how the observed variation maycontribute to the presence of marginal contrasts.