In the past few weeks I have been periodically practicing difficult sections of my archetype, especially in vowel sounds and stress. I have also "performed" for several non-linguistic friends and asked their opinions of areas where I sound Australian and areas where I still sound American. This has been helpful in determining what I still need to work on.
From a more academic perspective, I wanted to get a little variety and move away form my specific archetype to listen for and practice stress, prosody and vowel sounds (both stressed and reduced) in other passages that I found on the Macquaire website. Since I have memorized my archetype now, it has become very difficult for me to hear rightly the sounds that I am making when I speak and their relative distance from the target. I thought that if I washed my brain out with deliberate practice of some different target paragraphs, that might help me to get closer to where I want to be.
To compare the prominence patterns, I first recorded myself reading the following four passages in English. I then listened carefully both to my American recordings and the Australian recordings. I marked stressed words with square boxes and highlighted the words in each clause or phrase that I believed was most prominent. In several cases, two or more syllables in a phrase seemed equally prominent to my ears, so I tended to err on the side of over-highlighting prominence. I then analyzed the similarities and differences in prosidy in the four paragraphs, particularly paragraphs 1 and 4.
Me (American) Passage 1
Australian Passage 1
When comparing these first two, I was impressed by how I found the same exact number of prominent words, but that the points of prominence landed on the same syllables only 10/17 times. That's only 58% of the time! Also, these differences weren't specific to one part of speech. We chose to put adverbs, adjectives, nouns and verbs in the points of prominence with great variation. Sometimes we made similar choices, and sometimes we didn't.
For passage 2, I noted 21 prominent words in my own speech and 20 in the Australian sample. This paragraph was the most "conversational" of the four passages, and I think that shows in the prominence disparities. In these passages, only 9 points of prominence were in the same locations, or 45% of the time. My hypothesis is that American and Australian English probably has more differences in prosody when we are simply speaking than when we are reading from passages which share more unified cultural narrative patterns.
My Passage 2 Australian Passage 2
I must put in a disclaimer here that even individuals with the same cultural background would likely read these passages with slight alterations in prominence. However, I expect that members of a similar speech community and reading fluency level would be far more alike in their determinations of prominence than only 50-ish% of the time. Reading skill level, fluency, and familiarity with a particular genre doubtless play a role. Also, I know from experience that we read aloud according to patterns that we have learned from other native speakers. I read in a similar way to that which was read to me by my parents, and while this likely varies somewhat through families, it must also be generalizable across speech communities. (Otherwise, how would we know what to expect from audiobooks?)
Passage 3 and 4 are excerpts from the Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkein, a fantasy story written in Britain by a British man in the mid 20th century. I expected that since the American and Australian narrative literary tradition comes from the same roots, and this passage comes from a different dialect community altogether, the prominence markers in these passages would be more alike. However, I didn't analyze these at all scientifically. My basic premise was "mark all of the stress, then go find the one stressed part in each phrase that is the strongest". Additionally, I didn't mark intonation and how that affected my judgements of prominence. There were several instances where I marked two words very close to each other because the intonation went up on one and down on the other, indicating that this idea, rather than a specific word, is what was really prominent. This occurred in both Australian and my personal sample. I also went back and re-checked the American and Australian samples for passage 3 and 4 a second time, because a significant amount of time passed between when I "measured" passages 1 and 2 and when I did the same to passages 3 and 4.
Here are the pictures of Passages 3 and 4 before modification, but after modification I determined that the prominent point count stands thus: #3: Australia 29, Me 25. Passage #4: Australia 44, Me 41.
So, for passage 3 the prominent points lined up 13 times, and for passage #4 it lined up 30 times. If I take the higher number from the Australian passage totals as my point of comparison, that means in passage #3 the prominent points correlated 49% of the time and for passage 4 they lined up 68% of the time. This last one is a lot higher!
Australian passage #4
One of the things I found most interesting about passage 4 are some of the sections that did line up! For example, both my version (which I recorded and coded BEFORE listening to the Australian passage, by the way) and the Australian speaker highly emphasized the phrases "two big round pale eyes", "quite quietly" and "He paddled it with large feet dangling over the side, but never a ripple did he make. Not he." in exactly the same way. This is pretty cool. It demonstrates to me that there are shared conventions for storytelling and narration that have been and continue to be maintained across the globe for our English dialect group, at least among native speakers and for certain types of stories. We have some mutual expectations for how language is supposed to sound, even though we often, as much as half the time in this informal and ridiculously unscientific case study, emphasize different words and phrases in different ways.
So.....how does this relate specifically to making me sound more Australian? Well....I'm not sure it does. But it does help me to understand some of the features that may be playing a role in narration and conversation in different dialects. Additionally, this side project helped me to hear better the differences between cultivated Australian dialect, which is what the narrator of these passages was speaking, and my Archetype, which has a thicker more "brogue-like" accent. I mentioned at the beginning of the post that hearing these sound distinctions was one of the issues I wanted to address at this point in the project. Therefore, I consider that issue addressed.
Because I have realized that these accents are really not the same, I chose not to try and imitate and record these passages, because I think it might actually be detrimental to making me sound like the archetype in terms of phonology. The narrator of these passages doesn't use as much of a nasal sound or the same quality of back vowels that my archetype does. My post next week will return to things that I have been working on related directly to my archetype, particularly nasality and the velarization of back vowels just mentioned.
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