In modern urban Singapore, the variety of English spoken evolves through a continual negotiation of adhering to traditionally standard models and creating local norms in the environment of myriad social and substratum language influences. Singapore English (SgE) speakers constantly navigate a multilingual situation which requires them to simultaneously handle the language systems of the society’s main working language, English, and at least one other language while being immersed in a linguistic environment where interactions in countless other languages and varieties take place. Variation, thus, inevitably exists within SgE as depicted in models of variation developed throughout the years. While this variation manifests itself in many forms, this study focuses particularly on the sociophonetic variation of /r/ realisations, an area of SgE in which the little research done previously provides only impressionistic or preliminary descriptions. Here, /r/ variation is studied through an auditory and acoustic investigation of both read and conversational speech data collected from male and female SgE speakers of Singapore’s major ethnic groups (i.e. Chinese, Malay, Indian, and Eurasian). Through the use of an auditory perceptual strength index and a combination of fixed- and mixed- effects statistical modelling methods, this study reveals /r/ variation in SgE on several levels. Results show that SgE speakers produce a range of /r/ variants, both within and between speakers, and also highlight the intertwined roles of language-internal factors (e.g. phonological contexts, word class) and language-external factors (e.g. speech style, ethnicity, speaker sex) in determining variation in both the realisation and distribution of /r/ in SgE. Finer auditory and acoustic distinctions are found in approximant /r/, reflecting both the phonetic complexity of /r/ and the multifaceted nature of SgE. Additionally, supportive evidence for the presence of innovative trends in SgE /r/ realisation (i.e. labiodental /r/) and of fading ones (i.e. taps/trills) is also found. Taken together, these results provide the basis for discussions of a potential situation of natural /r/-weakening and the impacts of speech styles, cross-linguistic influences, and language dominance on /r/ variation. They also postulate trends of change in /r/ realisations in SgE affected by age, ethnicity and speaker sex. Besides contributing to the general on-going discussions of synchronic variation and diachronic change in the story of /r/, this study shares insights into the intricacies of studying linguistic patterns in multilingual urban communities and provides empirical evidence for the need of a multidimensional approach in researching multicultural varieties and/or ‘New Englishes’ like SgE.

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Orientador: Tânia Maria Alkmim / Tese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-16T03:14:16Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Leite_CandidaMaraBritto_D.pdf: 3260900 bytes, checksum: 16c8b0a012edca7528784965aaa360a0 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2010 / Resumo: Este trabalho, desenvolvido no âmbito da Sociolingüística, é resultado de uma pesquisa que buscou investigar a variação e as atitudes relacionadas a um segmento lingüístico do falar campineiro: o /R/ em posição de coda silábica. A hipótese que norteou a pesquisa é que o rótico está em um estado mais avançado, se comparado a outras cidades do interior paulista, no que se refere ao enfraquecimento desse segmento, tendendo à vocalização ou ao apagamento. Esse enfraquecimento seria o responsável pela impressão, de oitiva, dos informantes que julgam pronunciar uma variante de /R/ avaliada como "intermediária" e indicada como característica do falar campineiro. A partir dessa proposição, busca-se analisar o processo de variação lingüística do /R/ em posição de coda silábica medial e final que parece ocorrer em Campinas e investigar as atitudes lingüísticas, nos termos de Schlieben-Lange (1993), procurando descrever os estereótipos e as atitudes relacionados à variável lingüística em questão. Para tanto, o corpus selecionado é composto por dados de doze informantes naturais de Campinas. Esses dados foram coletados mediante entrevista semi-diretiva e através da leitura de palavras e sentenças. Foram realizadas análises auditivas e acústicas do rótico com o intuito de verificar quais as variantes que concorrem em posição de coda silábica. Essas análises poderiam fornecer informações para que se possa compreender os depoimentos dos informantes campineiros. Os resultados alcançados nesta pesquisa mostram que há variação lingüística do rótico e que a variante mais freqüente é o /R/ caipira. Esse resultado contraria a alegada existência de um /R/ característico do falar campineiro / Abstract: This sociolinguistic work investigates the variation and social attitudes related to a linguistic segment of Campinas native accent: /R/ in syllabic coda position. The hypothesis that guided this research is that the rhotic is in a more advanced state than in other cities in the countryside of São Paulo as regards its attenuation, which causes it to be either vocalized or erased. This attenuation would be the responsible for the hearsay impression of the informants who believe to utter a variant of /R/ assessed as "intermediate" and seen as proper to Campinas native accent. We depart from this assumption in order to analyze the process of linguistic variation of /R/ in final and medial syllable coda position that appears to occur in Campinas, and to investigate linguistic attitudes (Schlieben-Lange, 1993). Our attempt is to describe the stereotype and attitudes related to the linguistic variety at stake. The corpus comprises data collected from twelve native inhabitants of Campinas. The informants were interviewed and had to read words and sentences. We undertook auditoryand acoustic analyses of the rhotic so as to verify which varieties co-occur in syllable coda position. Theses analyses could provide useful information to understand the accounts of the informants. The results evidence that there is linguistic variation of the rhotic and that the most frequent variety is caipira /R/. This finding contradicts the alleged existence of a typical Campinas /R/ / Doutorado / Linguistica / Doutor em Linguística

Orientador: Eleonora Cavalcante Albano / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-11T03:04:00Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Rodrigues_LucianaLessa1982-_M.pdf: 2139458 bytes, checksum: 3337b6106de977a088590d68d333e75d (MD5) Previous issue date: 2008 / Resumo: O objetivo deste estudo foi investigar o processo de aquisição dos róticos por crianças com queixa fonoaudiológica relacionada ao sistema fônico. Foram coletados dados de fala de dois sujeitos com dificuldades de pronúncia de sons róticos. O quadro de referência teórico adotado na análise foi a Fonologia Gestual (Fonologia Articulatória ¿ FAR ¿ proposta por Browman e Goldstein, 1992, na versão denominada Fonologia Acústico-Articulatória ¿ FAAR ¿ proposta por Albano, 2001). Os resultados permitiram observar a presença de contrastes fônicos nas produções de fala dos sujeitos que, por meio de análise de outiva, foram classificadas como: (a) omissão do tap [R]; e (b) substituição tanto do tap [R] quanto da aproximante retroflexa [¿] pela semivogal [j]. Esse achado permitiu confirmar a existência de contrastes fônicos encobertos durante o processo de aquisição do sistema fônico, ou seja, contrastes já em andamento na fala dos sujeitos que ainda não são perceptíveis para o ouvinte. Esses resultados trouxeram, portanto, importantes contribuições para a área de pesquisa sobre Aquisição Fonológica e, conseqüentemente, para a prática clínica relativa a crianças com queixa fonoaudiológica relacionada ao sistema fônico. Tais contribuições foram possíveis devido à metodologia e análise dos dados baseados em princípios da FAAR, que permitiu a observação de fatos fônicos tanto categóricos quanto gradientes / Abstract: The aim of this study was to investigate the acquisition of rhotic sounds in children with so called deviant phonological systems. Speech data on two subjects with rhotic pronunciation difficulties were collected. The theoretical frame of reference adopted in the analysis was Gestural Phonology (Articulatory Phonology ¿ AP ¿ proposed by Browman and Goldstein, 1992, in the Acoustic-Articulatory version ¿ AAP ¿ proposed by Albano, 2001). The results showed the presence of covert phone contrasts in the speech productions of the subjects. Such productions had been classified, auditorily, as: (a) omission of the tap [R]; and (b) substitution of the palatal approximant [j] for both the tap [R] and the retroflex approximant [¿]. This finding suggests the existence of covert contrasts during phonological acquisition, i.e., contrasts already in progress in the speech of the subjects which are not yet perceivable for the listener. These results brought, therefore, important contributions to Phonological Acquisition research and, consequently, to the clinical practice with children diagnosed as having deviant phonological systems. Such contributions have been made possible by methodology and analysis based on principles of Gestural Phonology, which allowed for the observation of categorical and gradients phone distinctions / Mestrado / Linguistica / Mestre em Linguística

The thesis in its theoretical part discusses the rhotics, including the Czech trills, and especially focuses on articulatory, perceptual and acoustic properties of the fricative trill [ř]. Attention is also paid to possible corrections of disorders of pronunciation. In the experimental part the research of the realization of the trill [ř] by non-native speakers of Czech is described. This research mainly deals with differences in articulation, which are produced by the non-native speakers of Czech (specifically the native speakers of German, Polish, Russian and Vietnamese language). Key words: rhotics, trills, devoicing, trilling, foreigner accent, language level.

The body of the literature examining the acquisition of Spanish rhotics is expanding (e.g., Canfield, 1940; Face, 2006; Rose, 2010; Hurtado & Estrada, 2010). Most studies on the acquisition of Spanish rhotics have focused on how students progress at different levels of instruction (e.g., Rose, 2010; Hurtado & Estrada, 2010) while various other factors have been shown to affect the second language acquisition of phonology, such as style variation (e.g., Diaz-Campos, 2006; González--Bueno, 1997; Zampini, 1994), L1 transfer (e.g., Major, 2001), and experience abroad (e.g., Díaz-Campos, 2004, 2006; Lafford, 2006). Work on the acquisition of the Spanish tap and trill by regular classroom students has consistently shown that these sounds, especially the trill, are difficult to master for adult English speaking learners (e.g., Reeder, 1998; Face, 2006). However, the influence of factors such as cultural sensitivity, motivation, and experience abroad has been relatively understudied. This study explores the influence of these factors on the second language acquisition of the pronunciation of Spanish rhotics. In order to investigate the acquisition of Spanish pronunciation, 39 adult learners of various levels of instruction participated in the study. Participants completed a background questionnaire, the Survey of Motivational Intensity (Gardner 1985), and the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI) as a measure of cultural sensitivity. Learners' speech was recorded as they completed three different tasks, including a brief oral interview, the reading of a story, and a world list including rhotics in six different phonetic contexts that students were asked to read aloud. The tasks were recorded digitally and production of the tap and trill was analyzed spectrographically using Praat. Finally, the relationship between the aforementioned factors and target-like production of /ɾ/ and /r/ was explored with a crosstab analysis combined with an ANOVA analysis and a multiple regression analysis. The results show that neither Motivational Intensity nor Cultural Sensitivity have an influence in the acquisition of Spanish rhotics. Level of instruction and time of residence are the main predictors of target like pronunciation of the Spanish rhotics. The phonetic context harder to acquire is the trill after an alveolar consonant while the easiest is the tap between vowels.

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Unlike Canadian English which has two liquid consonant phonemes, /ɹ, l/ (as in right and light), Japanese is said to have a single liquid phoneme whose realization varies widely both among speakers and within the speech of individuals. Although variants of the /r/ sound in Japanese have been described as flaps, laterals, and weak plosives, research that has sought to quantitatively describe this phonetic variation has not yet been carried out. The aim of this thesis is to provide such quantification based on 1,535 instances of /r/ spoken by four individuals whose near-natural, unscripted conversations had been recorded as part of a larger corpus of unscripted Japanese maintained by Dr. Nick Campbell of Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (ATR), Kyoto, Japan. Tokens of /r/ were extracted from 30-minute conversations between one pair of male speakers and one pair of female speakers. Each token was narrowly transcribed into the International Phonetic Alphabet, then categorized based on the author’s perception of: 1) the strength/narrowness of central oral articulatory stricture, and 2) the presence or absence of an auditory-perceptual lateral and/or rhotic sound quality. Transcription and category frequencies for each speaker averaged across all environments were then compared with frequencies in specific phonological environments to ascertain whether a particular environment was amenable to a ‘drift’ towards any particular category of variant, and whether patterns of ‘drift’ applied to all speakers or varied on an individual basis. Transcriptions of the 1,535 tokens of /r/ ranged widely among lateral and non-lateral flaps, raised (i.e. increased articulatory contact) non-lateral flaps akin to light voiced plosives (e.g. Hattori 1951, Kawakami 1977), as well as lateral approximants and rhotic approximants. While two of the four speakers, both males, patterned similarly by dividing their productions of /r/ chiefly among short lateral approximants and rhotic approximants, each speaker did vary considerably in their choice of variants in any given environment. Drift is considered in terms of physiological parameters which may be optionally exploited to maintain phonological salience.