CAE 331 : Phonetics and Phonology
Assignment

Aim

The aim of the assignment is for you to analyse your own vowels with the help of computer analysis software, and to report on your findings. The final paper will constitute a description of the way you speak (in a fairly formal setting).

Outline

The analysis will be based on two sets of data:

• read: the Wolf passage
• conversation: speech from a conversation with your tutor. (The orthographic transcription of the conversation should be submitted as the appendix of your assignment.)

You should try to make the following kinds of comparison:

• how do your read and conversation vowels differ?
• how do your read vowels differ from those of a speaker of Standard Southern British (SSB)? (See Deterding, 1997).
• how do your vowels compare with the published materials on the vowels of Singapore English (see Deterding, 2003)

The following topics should be covered:

• monophthongs: plot the formants of your read and conversational monophthongs. Are any of these vowels in unexpected places in the formant plots? If so, does this represent an accurate characterization of your speech, or is an artifact of the measurements?
• diphthongs: is your /eI/ (and /oU) less diphthongal than that of an SSB speaker? (See Deterding, 2000)
• miscellaneous: what other non-standard features can you find in the vowels of your speech.  For example:
  - Do you use weak forms in unstressed syllables? (See Heng & Deterding, 2005)
  - Do you vocalise your dark /l/? (See Tan, 2005)
  - Do you produce words like 'our' as two syllables? (See Lim & Low, 2005)
  - Do you replace your dental fricatives with alveolar plosives? (See Moorthy and Deterding, 2000)
  - Are there any unusual (non-standard) pronunciations in your tape recording?

Deadline

Monday, 2 October 2006

Page Limit

Do not exceed 15 pages, excluding title page, References, and Appendix.

Use 12 pt font size, 1.5 line spacing.

References

When you write up your assignment, you MUST make references to standard works on phonetics, spectrographic analysis, and Singapore English. Below is a list of some of the works you might find useful. (There is no need to refer to all of them; but many of them may be useful to you.)

Brown, A (1999) Singapore English in a Nutshell: An Alphabetical Description of its Features, Singapore: Federal

Cruttenden, A (2001) Gimson's Pronunciation of English (6th edition), London: Edward Arnold.

Deterding, D (1997) 'The formants of monophthong vowels in Standard Southern British English Pronunciation', Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 27, 47-55.

Deterding, D (2000) 'Measurements of the /eI/ and /oU/ vowels of young English speakers in Singapore'. In Brown, A, Deterding, D & Low, E L (eds.) The English Language in Singapore: Research on Pronunciation, Singapore: Singapore Society for Applied Linguistics, pp. 93-99.

Deterding, D (2003) 'An instrumental study of the monophthong vowels of Singapore English', English World-Wide, 24(1), 1-16.

Deterding, D (2005) 'Emergent patterns in the vowels of Singapore English', English World-Wide, 26(2), 179-198.

Deterding, D & Poedjosoedarmo, G (1998) The Sounds of English: Phonetics and Phonology for English Teachers in Southeast Asia, Singapore: Prentice Hall. Chapters 17 and 28.

Hayward, K (2000) Experimental Phonetics, Harlow: Longman.

Heng, M G & Deterding D (2005) 'Reduced Vowels in Conversational Singapore English'. In Deterding, D, Brown, A & Low, E L (eds.) English in Singapore: Phonetic Research on a Corpus, Singapore: McGraw-Hill, pp. 54-63.

Kent, R D & Read, C (1992) The Acoustic Analysis of Speech, San Diego: Singular Publishing Group.

Ladefoged, P (2001) A Course in Phonetics (4th edition), Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

Lim, S S & Low, E L (2005) 'Triphthongs in Singapore English'. In Deterding, D, Brown, A & Low, E L (eds.) English in Singapore: Phonetic Research on a Corpus, Singapore: McGraw-Hill, pp. 64-73.

Low, E L & Brown, A (2005) Singapore English: An Introduction, Singapore: McGraw-Hill.

Moorthy, S M & Deterding, D (2000) 'Three or Tree? Dental fricatives in the speech of educated Singaporeans'. In Brown, A, Deterding, D & Low, E L (eds.) The English Language in Singapore: Research on Pronunciation, Singapore: Singapore Society for Applied Linguistics, pp. 76-83.

Roach, P (2001) English Phonetics and Phonology (3rd edition), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Tan, K K (2005) 'Vocalisation of /l/ in Singapore English'. In Deterding, D, Brown, A & Low, E L (eds.) English in Singapore: Phonetic Research on a Corpus, Singapore: McGraw-Hill, pp. 43-53.