Sociophonetic Variation in Vowel Categorization of Australian English.
Debbie Loakes, Josh Clothier, John Hajek and 1 others
PMID 37830314WHAT IT FOUND
Listeners varied in how they categorised Australian English vowels undergoing change.
Region, age and social group shaped responses, but hill-hell showed no variation.
Key findings
01On hell-Hal, Warrnambool and Melbourne listeners showed more merger behaviour than Albury-Wodonga and Mildura listeners.
02In Warrnambool, younger listeners showed clear merger behaviour on hell-Hal.
03In Warrnambool, Aboriginal listeners responded differently from mainstream listeners on hell-Hal.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The Aboriginal English group came from only one location, Warrnambool, and had 22 listeners. All participants had lived in the study locations for most or all of their lives, so the findings may not apply to highly mobile listeners. The stimuli used one speaker and synthesised vowel continua. The authors note that more phonetic contexts and individual data are needed before stronger claims about sound change can be made. Vowel production data from the same participants are reported as future work, not in this paper.
Declared interests
The authors disclosed funding from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language. The supplied text does not report other conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read regional or social-group differences in vowel categorisation as a clinical finding. The paper reports how community listeners categorised synthesised vowel continua.