Reversal of Short Front Vowel Raising in Australian English

We will also make reference to:
• Bernard [2] (henceforth 1965 data): 27 15-year-old male
pupils from Sydney recorded mid 1960s
• Australian Ancestors [16]: speakers born in rural areas
between 1885 and 1895 and recorded in oral history
interviews between 1960 and 1980
• Australian Voices [5]: 15-year-old boys from rural NSW
recorded in interviews in 1998.
All speakers selected above use a General Australian accent.
2.2. Speech Data
30 SAusE speaking female university students from Sydney’s
northern districts were recorded for this project between 2005
and 2007. All were under 30 years and could be considered
speakers of General Australian English. Recordings were
made in a sound treated recording studio in the Centre for
Language Sciences at Macquarie University. Speakers read
from a computer screen the 18 stressed monophthongs and
diphthongs of SAusE in the hVd frame three times in random
order. The vowels used in this analysis are given in Table 1.
/hVd/ words were used to provide a consistent phonetic
context for comparison with archival data. Speech data was
recorded using an AKG C535 EB microphone, Cooledit audio
capture software via M-Audio delta66 soundcard, to
a Pentium 4 PC at 44.1kHz sampling rate. The frequencies of
the first two formants were automatically tracked using the
ESPS/Waves (12th order LPC analysis with a 49 ms raised
cosine window and a frame shift of 5 ms). Speaker
normalization has not been carried out due to the large size of
the sample. Labelling was carried out using EMU [20],
(http://emu.sourceforge.net/) with reference to wideband
spectrograms and aligned waveforms. The beginning and end
of each vowel was labeled according to criteria in [17] and
the resulting formant traces were hand-corrected where
required. The formant frequencies of F1 and F2 at the vowel
target were extracted. Results will be presented in F1/F2
vowel space plots to illustrate the relative positions of the
vowels within the monophthong space and will be presented
in Hertz to facilitate comparison with earlier datasets.
Table 1. The words used to elicit /hVd/ vowels
HID /ɪ/ HEED /iː/
HEAD /e/ HARD /ɐː/
HAD /æ/ HOARD /oː/
HUD /ɐ/ WHO’D /ʉː/
HOD /ɔ/ HEARD /ɛː/
HOOD /ʊ/
3. Results
3.1 Comparison 1: Australian Ancestors and
Australian Voices
The comparison 1 analysis [16], carried out in 2004,
compared continuous speech data from 5 male speakers each
from the Australian Ancestors database (speakers born in the
late 19 th century) and the Australian Voices database (15year-olds
from rural NSW recorded in 1998). This
represented a potential one hundred year time difference and
found, among other things, lowered /æ/ and raised /e/ and /ɪ/
in the modern group compared with the old group. Figure 1
illustrates these results. It is important to acknowledge that
aging could potentially affect the formant data here.
However, the results do provide some support for the idea
that short front vowel raising continued for /e/ and /ɪ/
throughout the 20 th century. We cannot say whether there was
any further raising of /æ/ during the 20 th century but we know
from Cox [21] that /æ/ appeared stable in the years prior to
the mid 1960s as no change was present for this vowel in an
apparent time analysis based on Bernard’s [2] data from the
period.
Figure 1: Comparison 1: Vowels extracted from the
continuous speech of 5 male speakers each from the
Australian Ancestors (old-archival) and Australian
Voices databases (modern-1998).
Figure 2: Comparison 2: The 1965/1990 comparison
for monophthongs produced by male speakers
discussed in Cox [17] is illustrated here.