Week 2: Listening and Research

 This week, my goal for the project was to try and set the vocal quality settings that I would need to adequately imitate an Australian accent.

According to Celce-Murcia, Brinton and Goodwin (2010), each dialect or language has not only specific vowel and consonant sounds that they use, but also speaker group-wide characteristics of how they position their vocal organs and utilize muscle tension. This has been shown to be important in several research studies, but much of the information about a given language's vocal quality characteristics are "too subjective or unreliable to merit pedagogical application at the present time." (page 32). There was little advice in the text itself on how to go about finding and developing vocal quality settings.  Thus I got the impression that while setting the Australian vocal quality for my own voice would be very important in the development of a convincing accent, I must figure out for myself what those subjective qualities are. So, in this last week (Jan 21-28) I used three strategies to try and discover aspects of a vocal quality setting for my accent.


First, I endeavored to listen to as much Australian English as possible (via movies and YouTube videos). This activity doubled as an effective excuse to have some down time. I spent about 5 hours this week watching  Australian films and TV shows, focusing on an analysis of the female voices and contrastive analysis with my own accent. I justified this also by acknowledging that many methods of teaching pronunciation emphasize listening as a critical first step (Audio-Lingual method, the Direct method, TPR, and even CLT). Celce-Murcia, Brinton and Goodwin (2010) specifically state that listening discrimination is critical, because you must be able to hear the difference in sounds before you can accurately produce them (46). Furthermore, I'm an auditory learner, so I considered this even more critical for my own personal learning style. I hope to continue exposing myself to the Australian dialect in various forms throughout the semester, although not as intensively as I did this week.

Secondly, I spent about two hours this weekend looking up further information/research about Australian dialects and pronunciation. As an academically minded person, I sometimes find that reading research about something helps me to understand it better, which may in some way help me produce it (eventually). Lastly, I listened to and imitated my archetype each day at least once. Next week I will spend less time on the listening and research and more time in deliberate practice to try and set my vocal quality as closely as possible to my archetype.

Here are the most relevant bits of information that I gleaned from my research this week:
          *I first observed that in general, Male actors tended to have stronger, thicker and more identifiably "Australian" accents than women. Additionally, many of the female speaker's vowels were exremely close or identical to some varieties of British English. I later found the following chart from Cox (2006) detailing the differences in vowel quadrangles between male and female teen speakers of Standard Australian English.

 

This chart shows visually how much lower the low vowels are for female speakers, and how much more "frontwards" and tense the high ones tend to be. I expect that this chart, as well as the several others in Cox's other research articles will help me as I learn to approximate these vowels. 

           *Overall, I observed that this dialect is much closer to British English varieties than American ones, and thus I can see that the vocal quality settings, or where I put my articulators and my muscle tension, may indeed be one of the most obvious distinguishing factors of the Australian accent. The other really obvious distinction is in sentence stress and intonation, suprasegmental features that I will deal with in another post.

            * It seemed to me through listening that the back of the tongue is generally lower and cupped, while at the same time the front of my mouth feels much tighter than when I speak my native dialect. At first I was not sure whether this is a symptom of attempting any new dialect, or if the dialect itself truly requires that kind of vocal posturing. However, the chart above seemed to support these observations. I further found the following website from Macquaire University in Sydney (where Felicity Cox teaches) that contains comparison vowel charts for North American, Australian, New Zealand and RP English varieties. I will spend time studying this chart and making use of it in the future.

http://clas.mq.edu.au/phonetics/phonetics/vowelgraphs/index.html

Finally, here is my second archetype attempt. While working on this second attempt, I focused on keeping my back vowels low with my tongue cupped a bit, tried to copy the way my archetype speakers' mouth looked in the front (very open with front vowels pushed out) and more closely copying her intonation and stress than last time. I also emphasized eliminating final "r" sounds and elongating the stressed diphthongs.


Attempt #2

Although I am still cringing at a lot of the really bad mistakes and poor guesses at individual sounds, I can tell that the overall tone of my voice has improved since last time. In the initial attempt my pitch was much too high and unnatural. I'm closer on the vowels this time than I was before, and I was able to notice some specific consonant sounds that need work as well (especially s's and r's). My goal for next week is to continue to improve my vocal tone, create quality settings, and analyze in audacity the wave forms of the two recordings to compare overall quality.