Michael G. Ashby

• MA DPhil (Oxon)
• Lecturer at University College London

This paper argues that significant research and teaching in experimental phonetics at UCL preceded the establishment of the laboratory in 1912 by almost a decade. The forgotten work of E. R. Edwards [1] combined descriptive and experimental approaches in a pioneering study of Japanese. Recently recovered artefacts, and a close reading of the early...

Silent 35mm movie footage has been discovered at UCL showing in detail the operation of a kymograph and of a sensitive flame. The experimenter who appears in the clips is almost certainly Stephen Jones, superintendent of the phonetics lab from its foundation in 1914. This paper documents the discovery and restoration of the film and analyses the co...

1 Introduction In this paper we call attention to a range of sounds encountered in the description of English varieties, and English phonology in general, which are almost universally heard, described and symbolised as plosives – but which, on close analysis, turn out to deviate markedly from the supposed norms of plosive-like articulation (as disc...

This work attempts to discover something about the hundreds of relatively obscure language teachers around the world who put Reform Movement principles to work in their teaching. We use the surviving records of the teachers’ memberships in the International Phonetic Association (IPA). At its foundation and for many years afterwards the IPA was prim...

BRIAN WILLAN, Sol Plaatje: A life of Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje, 1876–1932. Auckland Park [Johannesburg]: Jacana, 2018. Pp. xxiv + 711. ISBN: 9781431426447 - Boikanyego Sebina, Michael Ashby

This study focuses on a corpus assembled from commercial recordings of 1929 and 1932 featuring the two British linguists J. R. Firth (1890–1960) and Daniel Jones (1881–1967). The aim is to analyse and quantify differences in the Received Pronunciation (RP) used by the two men, in relation to sociolinguistic and stylistic variation within RP of the...

In this paper we call into question the value of ‘rules’ concerning intonation to the learner of English. Are there predictive rules of sufficient generality and power to make them worth learning explicitly, or would learners’ time be better spent on habit-forming drills of common patterns? Examining a typical test passage for advanced students, we...

ERIC J. HELLER , Why you hear what you hear: An experiential approach to sound, music, and psychoacoustics. Princeton, NJ & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2012. Pp. i–xxviii + 590. ISBN: 9780691148595 - Michael Ashby

The Association has enjoyed a period of financial stability in which strong royalty income from JIPA has been coupled with efficiency savings driven by the Secretary and Treasurer. As a result we have had a surplus in each year, and our total assets have grown by more than 80% over four years. This is despite the continued decline in the value of t...

Annie (‘Nan’) Anthony died on 1 May 2014 after a short illness. Born Annie Rodger in Dysart in 1933, she gained her MA in Modern Languages in 1955 from the University of Edinburgh, and worked on the Linguistic Survey of Scotland 1956–1958. In 1957 she married James (`Tony') Anthony, who had charge of the Edinburgh phonetics lab. While their childre...

The autocorrelation function, a measure of regularity in the speech signal, is applied in demarcating the seemingly diffuse intervals of glottalization which accompany or replace voiceless oral stops in elicited recordings from 22 young speakers of Southern British English. It is shown that a local minimum in autocorrelation characterizes almost al...

John Baldwin, a former member of the UCL Phonetics Department, died on 14 April 2013, at the age of 77, after a long illness. He was a member of the IPA Council in 1984–1990 and served for a time as Treasurer.

Phonetics may be defined as the science of speech. It is concerned with all aspects of the production, transmission, and perception of the sounds of language. According to one’s view of the scope of the term “linguistics,” phonetics may be regarded as an independent discipline alongside linguistics, or alternatively as a component within it, though...

Nasal accelerometry Nasality in speech can be detected through vibrations of nasal tissue, with a miniature accelerometer attached on the external surface of the nose (Stevens et al 1975, Lipmann 1981). However, as low levels of nasal vibration are detectable for sounds phonologically classified as oral, and to take account of variations in speakin...

This study examines whether English L1 and Japanese L2 listeners differ in the way they perceive the glottal stop as a signal to a phonological contrast in English. Glottal stops are often used by native English speakers as an allophone of /t/, including intervocalic environments, while this variation is not found in Japanese. Thus, the different L...

This paper reviews trends and directions suggested by recent research in phonetic pedagogy. In the first place, it looks at the issue of aims and content across the different academic contexts where phonetics is taught; secondly, it describes recent trends in teaching/assessment methods; and finally, it reviews web-based resources that can be used...

This paper reports the results of a number of corroborative acoustic measures applied to an extensive corpus of recordings which had previously been analysed auditorily for sociophonetic research, gathered from teenage (14-16 yr-old) speakers of Southern British accents of English, with a focus on "glottal stops" and "glottally-reinforced" plosives...

What is reproduced here must be as rare an item as any from the early years of the IPA – an unused membership application form for the decade 1910–1919. The section to be completed by the applicant is perforated, ready to be torn along the wavy line. The form is probably a token of the systematic and meticulous approach of the young Daniel Jones (1...

This paper revisits data from teenage (14-16 years old) speakers of British English, previously been gathered for a sociophonetic study employing an auditory analysis. The newly augmented data consists of nearly a thousand tokens of syllable non-initial /t/, from 22 speakers, where glottal or preglottalised variants are possible realisations. The r...

As well as conveying a message in words and sounds, the speech signal carries information about the speaker’s own anatomy, physiology, linguistic experience and mental state. These speaker characteristics are found in speech at all levels of description: from the spectral information in the sounds to the choice of words and utterances themselves. T...

Historically, the phonological system of Japanese did not allow voiced geminate obstruents, and they can be found only in recent loanwords such as /baggu/ "bag" and /kiddo/ "kid". However, the voicing of geminates in such loanwords is problematic, and seemingly voiceless pronunciations are often to be heard. In a nonsense word study, three speakers...

English idioms commonly appear to exhibit relatively fixed prosodic patterns, and departure from the expected prosodic pattern can give rise to humorous and bizarre effects. As idioms are generally supposed to require phrasal entries in the mental lexicon, there is some initial plausibility in the proposal that such entries might include arbitrary...

This paper is concerned with the practical training of students taking specialized phonetics courses. While the central element in good practice remains small-group interactive teaching sessions in which the students work first with specially constructed materials, and later transcribe and imitate informants who speak a range of languages, we show...

INTRODUCTION This note records two episodes in which an English boy aged approximately 8 years made spontaneous metalinguistic comments on English intonation. In the first episode, at 7;10 years, he offered a comprehensive and revealing analysis of the changed interpretation which would have been associated with a particular English sentence had th...

From relevant surveys (Greenberg 1970, Maddieson 1984: 98–122) it appears that the only sound-types with glottalic suction initiation which are reliably attested in the sound systems of languages are oral-plus-velic stops with plain release, whether these be the common voiced types, or the rare voiceless types (see e.g. Pinkerton 1986) which receiv...

LassNorman J. (ed.), Speech and Language. Advances in Basic Research and Practice. (Volume 3, pp. 311; Volume 4, pp. 392. Academic Press: New York, 1980.) - Volume 12 Issue 2 - M. G. Ashby

MalécotAndré, Contribution à l'étude de la force d'articulation en français. (Pp. 78. Mouton: The Hague.) - Volume 9 Issue 2 - M. G. Ashby

This paper outlines a framework for the description of English intonation, and then reports on a study of “high falling” and “low rising” nuclear tones, based on measurements on a corpus of 150 utterances produced by three speakers. It is found (i) that under the conditions of the experiment, the various tokens of a given intonation type as produce...