Week 12: Nasality and Velarization

Over the past few weeks while I was working on the project described in the last post, I began to notice some differences between the speaker of the passages that I was analyzing and the speaker that I was trying to imitate. One of the big differences that was brought to the forefront was the issue of sound quality; I began to sense that my archetype has a nasal and velar quality to some of her words that is hard to hear, hard to imitate, and different from the speaker in the passages from the Macquarie website. Furthermore, I watched another Australian movie this week, and I noticed that this nasalization pattern is REALLY strong in the brogue dialect of male speakers. So, it must be one of those aspects of Australian English that varies based on dialect. My archetype speaker is, I think, a speaker of "general Australian", which is the one that is in the middle. Some of her phonemes sound like the brogue phonemes, but there are times when her English sounds very much like the "cultivated" Australian dialect.

Here are some of those places in my archetype's speech where the nasal and velar quality is most apparent. I will highlight the nasalized words in yellow and the velarized l's and far back (almost swallowed) vowels in red. The one instance of orange is when I thought I heard both.
"we are trying to change telephone companies...... we rang a whole bunch, most of them were..."

"It certainly sounded like..."

"um awful anyway..."

"and then we finally rang this other place..."

"needed a one-word answer..."

"a whole sentence or a whole paragraph or a whole spiel you know in answer"

"I've never been able to notice before..."


From these examples, you can see that nasalization usually occurs when a string of nearby words all have an /n/, /m/ or /ng/ sound combination. In these instances, the speaker just nasalizes the entire phrase. The velarization of super dark /l/ /r/ and back vowel "o" tends to happen on stressed words or words that show a pause in the sentence, like "like".

To practice, I've practiced listening to the speaker and repeating. I've done this in the short context of the sentence and in the partial and full monologue. I've also spent more time looking in the mirror while I practice. I am noticing that my overall mouth movements seem to have become smaller. I don't know if this means that my accent is getting more accurate and therefore less exaggerated  or if it means my ears and lips have become lazy and I'm not doing as well as I did originally. However, I can say that when I listen to my archetype, I "hear" her differently than I did at the beginning of this project. I would like to think that I sound more like her now than I did in the beginning, also.

Here's my recording for this week:

Week 12: nasalized and velarized syllables

I think that my nasals and velar syllables were ok in this recording, but they could still be better. I'll keep working on these. I also noticed that I've been doing the end of the dialogue quite differently from my archetype. I usually start at the beginning of the dialogue and work through it, so I think in the next week I'll practice working from the back to the front. I'll also re-visit errors that I've been making with /r/ sounds and vowels that still need assistance.