Australian English speakers’ attitudes to fricated coda /t/

ABSTRACT

The fricated allophone of coda /t/ is a variant in which full occlusion of the alveolar stop is not achieved, resulting in the consonant instead being produced via frication. Fricated /t/ is attested in several varieties of English from the British Isles and Southern Hemisphere. While awareness of the variant can be found in Australian popular culture, it has been the focus of few sociophonetic studies. Here we report on an experiment which investigated the social meanings that Australian English (AusE) speakers ascribe to fricated /t/. We used an online matched guise paradigm in which listeners were presented with short utterances from six speakers that had been acoustically manipulated to differ only in the variant of phrase-final /t/. Using a series of sliding scales, 100 listeners recorded their impressions of the speakers, both in terms of the speakers’ social identity and favourability. We hypothesized that AusE listeners would associate fricated /t/ with the descriptors ‘urban’ and ‘educated’, and that, for the three male speakers, fricated and released /t/ would be associated with the description ‘gay’. Partially consistent with the first hypothesis, results revealed that tokens were rated significantly more educated in the fricated guise than the unreleased guise, but this effect was driven by one male speaker who was also rated ‘straight’ and ‘rural’. Guise did not significantly predict ratings of ruralness, nor were male speakers rated significantly more gay in any specific guise. Additionally, straight males rated the accent of the gayest rated male speaker least like their own, unlike gay males or females and others. It is posited that the articulation associated with fricated /t/ situates it within an indexical field pointing to education, but that the effect of this is modulated by the presence of other indicators or markers.

KEYWORDS:

• Sociophonetics
• Australian English
• matched guise
• fricated /t/
• sexual orientation
• language attitudes
• gay male speech

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to express their gratitude to our six speakers for providing their time and voices towards the creation of our stimuli, and to our listeners. We thank the Macquarie University Phonetics Lab, for valuable feedback and encouragement, particularly Joshua Penney, and we are grateful to two anonymous reviewers and the editor Jean Mulder for insightful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The participants of this study did not give written consent for their data to be shared publicly, so due to the sensitive nature of the research supporting data are not available.

Notes

1 This paper employs Lexical Set terminology (Wells, 1982).

2 However, one filler sentence, Gabby took a walk in the bush, contained an unstressed HAPPY vowel, which in AusE is typically categorized with fleece in the phoneme /iː/.

3 Normalization was achieved by running a PRAAT script written by Gibson and Podlubny (2016). This script adjusts the mean amplitude of a batch of .wav files to match the quietest among them.

4 This number included many cases of participants beginning the survey then logging out, requiring them to restart.

5 In this Results section, statistics for significant results involving speaker are not provided in the text, because speaker is a multi-level factor where we are not interested in comparisons to the set reference alone. Full model summaries are available in the Appendices.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by Macquarie University Research Excellence Scholarship (MQRES-MRES), allocation 20191549 to the first author, and by Australian Research Council grant number DP190102164 and Australian Research Council Future Fellowship grant number FT180100462 awarded to the fourth author.

Notes on contributors

Timothy Shea

Timothy Shea is a current PhD candidate in the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University, whose research centres on phonetic and phonological variation. With a primary focus on the social meanings of this variation, his interests are drawn from traditional dialectology and modern sociophonetics, and are particularly focussed on the Australian English context. He was awarded a Bachelor of Arts (Linguistics) in 2018 and a Master of Research in 2021 for his thesis ‘Fricated /t/ in Australian English: A Sociophonetic Perception Study’, the latter supervised by Professor Felicity Cox and Dr Anita Szakay. Tim’s current doctoral research project, ‘A Sociophonetic Investigation of Men’s Speech in Australian English’, which will examine the role played by sexual orientation and orientation towards masculinity in shaping phonetic variation in Australian English-speaking men’s voices, is supervised by Professor Cox, Dr Szakay and Dr Joshua Penney.

Andy Gibson

Andy Gibson has been a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the Centre for Language Sciences at Macquarie University for the last three years, working alongside Felicity Cox on the ARC-funded project ‘Child Speech, Community Diversity, and the Emergence of Sound Change’. Andy’s research borders sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics, with a particular focus on performed language, co-editing with Allan Bell a 2011 special issue of the Journal of Sociolinguistics on this topic. Andy’s PhD from the University of Canterbury was entitled ‘Sociophonetics of Popular Music: Insights from Corpus Analysis and Speech Perception Experiments’ and was supervised by Jennifer Hay, Lynn Clark and Catherine Theys. In 2023, Andy will take up a position at Queen Mary University of London, working with Devyani Sharma on the ‘Generations of London English’ project.

Anita Szakay

Anita Szakay is a senior lecturer in Linguistics at Macquarie University. Her research interests lie at the intersection of experimental sociophonetics, psycholinguistics, cognitive science and bilingualism with publications in Cognition, Laboratory Phonology, Journal of Phonetics, Journal of Sociolinguistics among others. Her most recent project investigates bilingual listeners’ sensitivity to anticipatory phonetic cues before a code-switch.

Felicity Cox

Felicity Cox is a professor and ARC Future Fellow in the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University. She is the lead researcher on the project ‘Multicultural Australian English: The New Voice of Sydney’. She is also the recipient of an ARC Discovery project grant with Professor Jonathan Harrington (IPS Munich) for the project ‘Child Language, Community Diversity and the Emergence of Sound Change’ and a member of the team awarded an ARC Linkage Infrastructure Equipment and Facilities grant 2019 for ‘AusKidTalk: An Australian Children’s Speech Corpus’. Professor Cox is regarded as one of the foremost authorities on the Australian English accent having published extensively on phonetic characteristics of the variety with a focus on its history, evolution and variation. Her main research interests include the phonetic and phonological analysis of sound change, the acquisition of phonology and sociophonetics. She is the President of the Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association.