Project Summary

Current members:

Rachael-Anne Knight, Mark Jones, Christina Villafaña Dalcher

In collaboration with Mark Jones at the University of Cambridge work is being conducted which concerns the acoustics of the 'labiodental' variant of /r/ in adult and child speakers of British English, and the relationship between a speaker's production and perception.

Updates as of 1 August 2007

We will be presenting a poster on rhotic acquisition at the 16th Meeting of the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences in Saarbrücktn, Germany at the beginning of the month, and delivering a talk on rhotic perception at the Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain in early September.  Our work on adult perception of /r/ variants will also be presented in a talk at NWAV36 in Philadelphia in October of this year.  Please visit the Conference Presentations page for details on these.

A final write-up of our findings relating to child production and perception of rhotics is being prepared and will be submitted to a peer-reviewed journal in the near future.

Updates as of 9 May 2007

The data collection from phase 3 of the child study is nearly complete. We have designed a perception experiment in PsyScope and run it on 18 adults to date.  In March we wrote and submitted a paper addressing the rhotic development in one of our child subjects for the upcoming ICPhS conference in Saarbrücken.  In early April, we submitted an abstract for the 2007 LAGB conference in London, which was accepted.  This paper addresses the results of our adult perception testing.  We are now in the process of measuring the final phase of child data in preparation for a journal submission.  Finally, in March we submitted a proposal to the ESRC for funding that will help us explore rhotics in Standard Southern British English from an articulatory standpoint using ultrasound technology.

Updates as of 27 January 2007

All data from phase 1 of the child study has been measured and we are in the process of compiling results for a conference submission.  Phase 2 data, including perceptual data, will be collected by the end of February, and will be measured in March.  Phase 3 data collection is targeted for late April or May.

Updates as of 9 November 2006

We are in the final stages of collecting the first set of production data from participating children.  Over the next few weeks, we will be analyzing these data and compiling initial findings.

Updates as of 5 October 2006

The experiment details, including all stimuli and methodology, have been finalized and are available here.  All equipment will have arrived and been tested by the end of the week.  We are presently in the process of meeting with heads of schools and recruiting subjects.  Once we obtain parental consent we will begin gathering data immediately.