Intonational Variation in the North-West of England: The Origins of a Rising Contour in Liverpool.

This paper investigates intonation in the urban dialect of Liverpool, Scouse. Scouse is reported to be part of a group of dialects in the north of the UK where rising contours in declaratives are a traditional aspect of the dialect. This intonation is typologically unusual and has not been the subject of detailed previous research.

Dynamic acoustic-articulatory relations in back vowel fronting: Examining the effects of coda consonants in two dialects of British English.

This study examines dynamic acoustic-articulatory relations in back vowels, focusing on the effect of different coda consonants on acoustic-articulatory dynamics in the production of vowel contrast. This paper specifically investigates the contribution of the tongue and the lips in modifying F2 in the foot-goose contrast in English, using synchronized acoustic and electromagnetic articulography data collected from 16 speakers. The vowels foot and goose were elicited in pre-coronal and pre-lateral contexts from two dialects that are reported to be at different stages of back vowel fronting: Southern Standard British English and West Yorkshire English.

A typology of laterals in twelve English dialects.

Allophonic patterns of variation in English laterals have been well studied in phonetics and phonology for decades, but establishing broad generalizations across varieties has proven challenging. In this study, a typology of onset/coda lateral distinctions in English is advanced using crowdsourced recordings from 95 speakers across twelve dialects of Anglo (UK) English. Results confirm the existence of dialects with and without onset/coda distinctions, and conditional inference trees are used to identify three main patterns in the data: (1) clear onsets and dark codas; (2) intermediate/dark onsets and dark codas, but with a positional distinction intact; and (3) dark onsets and dark codas, with minimal or no distinctions between positions.

The acoustics of three-way lateral and nasal palatalisation contrasts in Scottish Gaelic.

This paper presents an acoustic description of laterals and nasals in an endangered minority language, Scottish Gaelic (known as "Gaelic"). Gaelic sonorants are reported to take part in a typologically unusual three-way palatalisation contrast. Here, the acoustic evidence for this contrast is considered, comparing lateral and nasal consonants in both word-initial and word-final position.

Dialect variation in formant dynamics: The acoustics of lateral and vowel sequences in Manchester and Liverpool English.

This study analyses the time-varying acoustics of laterals and their adjacent vowels in Manchester and Liverpool English. Generalized additive mixed-models (GAMMs) are used for quantifying time-varying formant data, which allows the modelling of non-linearities in acoustic time series while simultaneously modelling speaker and word level variability in the data. These models are compared to single time-point analyses of lateral and vowel targets in order to determine what analysing formant dynamics can tell about dialect variation in speech acoustics.