Dominic Watt

The University of York · Department of Language and Linguistic Science

Our social evaluation of other people is influenced by their faces and their voices. However, rather little is known about how these channels combine in forming "first impressions." Over 5 experiments, we investigate the relative contributions of facial and vocal information for social judgments: dominance and trustworthiness. The experiments manip...

Audio recordings of English are available from the first half of the twentieth century and thus complement the written data sources for the recent history of the language. This book is the first to bring together a team of globally recognised scholars to document and analyse these early recordings in a single volume. Looking at examples of regional...

One way of evaluating the salience of a linguistic feature is by assessing the extent to which listeners associate the feature with a social category such as a particular socioeconomic class, gender, or nationality. Such ‘top–down’ associations will inevitably differ somewhat from listener to listener, as a linguistic feature – the pronunciation of...

What constitutes a 'threatening tone of voice'? There is currently little research exploring how listeners infer threat, or the intention to cause harm, from speakers' voices. Here, we investigated the influence of key linguistic variables on these evaluations (Study 1). Results showed a trend for voices perceived to be lower in pitch, particularly...

Unequal outcomes in professional hiring for individuals from less privileged backgrounds have been widely reported in England. Although accent is one of the most salient signals of such a background, its role in unequal professional outcomes remains underexamined. This paper reports on a large-scale study of contemporary attitudes to accents in Eng...

Automatic Speaker Recognition (ASR) systems are designed to provide the user with statistics relating to the similarity of two or more speech samples and to the typicality of those shared features in the wider population. When an ASR system is used as part of a forensic investigation, the user must decide what counts as the appropriate ‘wider popul...

Only in very recent times has the concept of 'ownership' of a human voice begun to demand proper consideration in terms of its legal implications. The current lack of clarity with respect to the rights afforded to individuals and organisations in this area is something that must be addressed as a matter of some urgency, given that voice samples are...

Fair access to employment is vital for improving social mobility in Britain today. As language is not explicitly protected by the Equality Act 2010, accent can become a proxy for other forms of discrimination at key junctures for social mobility such as recruiting to elite professions. The Accent Bias in Britain project (www.accentbiasbritain.org)...

First impressions formed after seeing someone’s face or hearing their voice can affect many social decisions, including voting in political elections. Despite the many studies investigating the independent contribution of face and voice cues to electoral success, their integration is still not well understood. Here, we examine a novel electoral con...

Previous studies have shown that listeners perform worse in speaker identification experiments when they are unfamiliar with the accents of the speakers. Such effects have been documented for listeners hearing unfamiliar foreign languages (language familiarity effect) and unfamiliar regional accents ('other-accent' effect). The present study invest...

The Handbook of Dialectology provides an authoritative, up-to-date and unusually broad account of the study of dialect, in one volume. Each chapter reviews essential research, and offers a critical discussion of the past, present and future development of the area. The volume is based on state-of-the-art research in dialectology around the world, p...

Editors' introduction to 'The Handbook of Dialectology'

Place has always been central to studies of language, variation and change. Since the eighteenth century, dialectologists have been mapping language features according to boundaries - both physical and institutional. In the twentieth century, variationist sociolinguists developed techniques to correlate language use with speakers' orientations to p...

Report commissioned by HSBC as a tie-in to the integration of voice biometrics technology in their telephone banking operations.

Listeners, be they lay or expert, can to a greater or lesser extent distinguish and correctly identify different accents of familiar languages. This ability plays a central role across a spectrum of speech perception-based activities, not the least of which are speaker profiling and comparison of the sort carried out for forensic purposes. Factors...

Babel celebrated the publication of its 10th issue with a special lecture by dialect coach Dr Brendan Gunn.

This paper reviews techniques used in the direct, quantitative measurement of attitudes, before discussing the advantages of employing Visual Analog Scales. Innovative uses of these methods were developed for utilization in the large-scale sociophonetic study Accent and Identity on the Scottish/English Border. The paper presents the ‘Attitude Analo...

Identifying and examining political, socio-psychological and symbolic borders, Language, Borders and Identity encompasses a broad, geographically diverse spectrum of border contexts, taking a multi-disciplinary approach by combining sociolinguistics research with human geography, anthropology and social psychology. The book illustrates a representa...

It is regularly asserted that the interface between the dialects of southern Scotland and those of the far north of England is still a relatively sharp one, and that it persists in coinciding closely with the political border in spite of the presence of conditions which, in other contexts, have been shown to promote linguistic convergence. In this...

Although verbal threats are a very common kind of language crime, the ways in which listeners interpret ostensibly ‘neutral’ utterances as threats are currently poorly understood. We present the results of an experiment in which monolingual English-speaking listeners were exposed to the same innocuously-worded phrase spoken in a ‘neutral’ or a ‘thr...

The study presented in this paper investigates auditory-only and auditory-visual (AV) consonant recognition where the talker’s face is obscured by various types of face-concealing garments and headgear. Observers’ consonant identification performance across the various ‘facewear’ conditions was tested both in quiet listening conditions (Experiment...

Phonetically untrained British English-speaking listeners were asked to provide and rank up to four unprompted and unguided verbal descriptions of the voice qualities heard in controlled audio samples in English and German spoken by one talker per language. These were then pooled and ranked by frequency, and popularly-chosen descriptive labels were...

This paper firstly reports on the design of an audio-visual 'face cover' corpus. High-quality audio and video recordings were taken of 10 speakers reading phonetically-controlled stimuli under various face disguise conditions. Possible articulatory, acoustic and perceptual effects of the masks in a forensic context are introduced. Secondly, prelimi...

This paper presents findings on VOT variability in voiced and voiceless plosives produced by 159 speakers from four locations straddling the English-Scottish border. The analysis reveals key effects of both social and phonetic factors, highlighting the importance of both in accounting for variability.

The political border between England and Scotland has been claimed to coincide with the most tightly packed bundle of isoglosses in the English-speaking world. The borderland, therefore, may be seen as the site of discontinuities in linguistic features carrying socioindexical value as markers of “Scottishness” or “Englishness.” However, in an ongoi...

IntroductionDefining Sociophonetic VariationSociophonetic Studies of Speech ProductionSociophonetic Studies and Speech PerceptionMethodological IssuesTheoretical Implications of Sociophonetic StudiesWider Applications of SociophoneticsConclusion References

This study tests the extent of speakers’ linguistic accommodation to members of putative in-groups and out-groups in a border locality where such categorizations can be said to be particularly accentuated. Variation in the speech of informants in dialect contact interactions with separate interviewers is analyzed for evidence of speech accommodatio...

This article evaluates a speaker-intrinsic vowel formant frequency normalization algorithm initially proposed in Watt & Fabricius (2002). We compare how well this routine, known as the S-centroid procedure, performs as a sociophonetic research tool in three ways: reducing variance in area ratios of vowel spaces (by attempting to equalize vowel spac...

This paper reports the results of two experiments investigating the effects on speech acoustics and intelligibility of a number of different types of forensically-relevant fabric mouth and face coverings, including the niqāb (full-face Muslim veil), balaclava, and surgical mask. For the perceptual (intelligibility) experiment, subjects were present...

This paper evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of a speaker-intrinsic vowel formant frequency normalization algorithm initially proposed in Watt and Fabricius (2002) and modeled by Thomas and Kendall (2007) for direct comparison with other normalization algorithms. We evaluate the merits of the new routine as a sociophonetic research tool relati...

GOAT fronting in West YorkshireMorphosyntactic variability in BuckieConclusion

Voice Onset Time (VOT) was measured in word- initial /p t k b d / produced by 9 speakers of Aberdeen English (AE). The durations of /i e  a  o u/ and /ai/ were also measured to assess the extent to which the Scottish Vowel Length Rule (SVLR) (2) operates in the Aberdeen vowel system.

Segmental features of child-directed speech (CDS) were studied in a corpus drawn from thirty-nine mothers living in Tyneside, England. Focus was on the phonetic variants used for (t) in word-medial and word-final prevocalic contexts since it is known that these variants display clear sociolinguistic patterning in the adult community. Variant usage...

Tyneside English (TE) is spoken in Newcastle upon Tyne, a city of around 260,000 inhabitants in the far north of England, and in the conurbation stretching east and south of Newcastle along the valley of the River Tyne as far as the North Sea. The total population of this conurbation, which also subsumes Gateshead, Jarrow, North and South Shields,...

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The findings discussed in this paper emerge from a project focused on the speech of 40 English children aged between 2 and 4, the chief aim of which was to track the path taken by children in learning variable phonetic forms in their acquisition of the accent of their immediate community. We present initial results from an analysis of the linguisti...

Evidence is presented in this paper of the levelling of the Tyneside (Newcastle) English vowel system toward that of a putative regional standard. This process is hypothesised to follow from the fragmentation of tight-knit urban communities that formed after large-scale immigration to Tyneside from elsewhere in the British Isles during the 18th and...

We evaluate a vowel formant normalisation technique that allows direct visual and statistical comparison of vowel triangles for multiple speakers of different sexes, by calculating for each speaker a 'centre of gravity' S in the F1 ~ F2 plane. S is calculated on the basis of formant frequency measurements taken for the so-called 'point' vowel (), t...

No abstract available.

The /o/ vowel in the English of Bradford is produced by many speakers as a monophthong with a clearly fronted or central quality. Description of such a pronunciation is, however, all but absent from the literature, suggesting that such pronunciations are a relatively recent development in Bradford speech. The acoustic characteristics of 337 tokens...

The distribution of variants of the FACE and GOAT vowels in Tyneside English (TE) is assessed with reference to the age, sex, and social class of 32 adult TE speakers. The effects of phonological context and speaking style are also examined. Patterns in the data are suggestive of dialect leveling, whereby localized speech variants become rece...

Berwick upon Tweed is England's northernmost town, lying in the extreme northeastern corner of Northumberland just 3 miles (5km) from the Scottish/English border. While Berwick English can be said to feature many of the typical characteristics of rural Northumbrian English, it also has much in common with dialects of Scotland, and in this sense can...

This paper describes an investigation of the speech of children aged 2 to 4 from Newcastle upon Tyne. Our aim is to understand how variant phonetic patterns come to be acquired. These patterns include both phonologically governed alternations, such as the aspirated allophone of word-initial (t), and also sociolinguistically correlated variants. A b...

A previous study in Newcastle revealed patterns of variation and change in consonants and vowels correlating with sociolinguistic, phonological and lexical factors. This paper describes an investigation of the speech of children aged 2;0 to 4;0 in the same community, which aims to understand how variant patterns come to be acquired. We focus on fou...

Examination of phonetic variation in the vowels of 32 Tyneside (Newcastle) English speakers reveals that localised vowel features appear to be superseded by supra-local forms in the speech of younger informants. Classification of 2,709 tokens of /e/ and /o/ shows that ingliding diphthong variants (( I«) and (U«)) are less frequent among 16-25 year-...

This paper presents part of an ongoing research program which aims to apply mathematical and geometrical analytic methods to vowel formant data to enable the quantification of parameters of variation of interest to sociophoneticians. We open with an overview of recent research working towards a set of desiderata for choice of normalization algorith...