Rhotic consonants in English are known for their variability and susceptibility to change, yet the articulatory dynamics of rhoticity remain underexplored in England’s few remaining rhotic communities. This study provides the first systematic articulatory analysis of rhoticity in Blackburn, Lancashire – a region where non-prevocalic /r/ persists in contrast to most of England, the majority of which is now entirely non-rhotic. Through an analytical approach incorporating Generalised Additive Mixed Models applied to ultrasound tongue splines, we investigate whether articulatory evidence supports a weakening of rhoticity observed in recent acoustic research, focusing on contextual, generational and social variation. Our findings reveal significant articulatory differences between age groups, with younger speakers showing weaker rhoticity, suggesting a sound change in progress in Blackburn. In line with previous findings, we consider evidence for this being a female-led change. Unexpectedly, we document retroflex articulations in contexts thought to disfavour them, such as coda /r/ in front vowel contexts, highlighting the nuanced nature of variation across different rhotic varieties and the potential to miss out on possible micro-typologies if we do not document them before they are lost. These results contribute to broader discussions of how sound changes propagate, offering new insights into the interaction between articulation, acoustics and social factors. This study also introduces a replicable methodological framework for capturing sound change in progress through ultrasound imaging, advancing the field of articulatory sociophonetics. By bridging methodological innovation with theoretical significance, this analysis deepens our understanding of rhoticity and its role in English more generally.
This special issue brings together six papers exploring how speech prosody intersects with other linguistic, cognitive and social domains, with particular attention to methodological diversity and understudied languages. The collection addresses a range of complementary topics: the role of intonation in resolving lexical ambiguity in Korean; the perceived personality traits of synthetic versus natural voices; prosodic modifications children make in demanding communicative contexts; perceptual cues to lexical pitch accent discrimination in South Kyungsang Korean; rhythmic differences between Hadari and Bedouin Arabic dialects; and durational marking of lexical stress beyond the stressed syllable in Soikkola Ingrian and Ayutla Tlapanec. Collectively, these studies make valuable contributions to the empirical and theoretical foundations of prosody research. By combining diverse methods with a broad linguistic scope, the collection provides a basis for future research on how prosody interacts with other dimensions of language and communication.
This study investigates the contact-induced grammaticalization of the Turkish existential mouthing /var/ (“there is”) in Turkish Sign Language, proposing a novel Cross-Modal Contact Route for grammaticalization. Based on 1,024 attested existential/possessive constructions identified within a corpus of 101,908 tokens from 58 signers, we analyze the distribution of variants along a unidirectional reduction cline (/ var / > / va / > biting lips, bl). Generalized estimating equations and multinomial logistic regression analyses reveal a robust apparent time effect: while older signers retain the full spoken mouthing, younger signers predominantly use the biting lips—a visual remnant of the initial labiodental fricative [v]—indicating a change from below. Significantly, the structural autonomy of the emergent gesture is supported by 118 tokens—produced exclusively by signers aged 45 or younger (16–45)—where the bl marker attaches to non-existential hosts (e.g., group , pocket ) and pronominal signs, functioning as an independent clitic for existence and possession. These findings problematize the rigid theoretical distinction between mouthings and mouth gestures, demonstrating that spoken lexical items can be scavenged, eroded, and nativized into the visual grammar of a sign language, effectively expanding current models of grammaticalization.
Although bilingual vowel perception has received great interest in the past, surprisingly few studies have focused on preschool children. To shed light on this understudied age group, the present study investigated 5- to 7-year-old Turkish–German bilingual children ( n = 24), age-matched monolingual German-speaking children ( n = 26), and German-speaking adults ( n = 10), using an oddity task. The study pursues two major goals: first, we aimed to extend findings for Turkish–German bilingual school children (aged 9–12 years) to a younger group, and second, we explored potential differences related to age of onset (AoO) of German within the bilingual children (AoO of German <4 years; simultaneous bilingual children: n = 12, both languages from birth onwards; successive bilingual children: n = 12, AoO ~3;0–3;5 years). The materials included the four German vowel contrasts [ɑː]~[iː], [eː]~[ɛ], [iː]~[ɪ], and [iː]~[eː]. We predicted differences due to age (adults vs. children), language status (monolingual vs. bilingual), and vowel contrast. Furthermore, we explored potential differences by type of bilingualism (simultaneous vs. successive). The results of the Bayesian linear mixed-effects model reveal very strong evidence for age differences (adults vs. children), inconclusive evidence regarding language status (monolingual vs. bilingual), and weak evidence for the absence of differences by type of bilingualism (simultaneous vs. successive). Our results demonstrate that adult-like performance may not be expected in monolingual preschool children when explicit L1 vowel perception tasks are used. In contrast to some previous studies reporting monolingual-bilingual differences for certain vowel contrasts, the evidence for differences in vowel discrimination abilities between monolingual and bilingual preschool children in the present study remains inconclusive.
Research on social priming in speech perception has focused on Western contexts and typically examined aggregate effects rather than temporal dynamics. To address these gaps, we investigated how social primes modulate L1 Japanese speech perception over time using a visual matched-guise transcription-in-noise task. University students in the Tokyo area transcribed native Japanese sentences while viewing one of four visual primes: an East Asian face, a Southeast Asian face, a Black face, or an East Asian face with a Chinese name. Results revealed nonlinear learning trajectories, with accuracy improving rapidly in early trials before gradually plateauing. Across the full session, learning rates did not differ significantly across prime conditions, although a sensitivity analysis indicated that condition differences in improvement smaller than roughly 15 percentage points could not have been reliably detected. An exploratory split-half analysis revealed that learning rates differed across conditions during the first 20 trials, with the Black prime yielding the steepest early improvement. These differences had disappeared by Trials 21 to 40, and overall trajectory shapes did not robustly differ across conditions. This pattern is consistent with the account that, in L1 speech perception, socio-phonetic information carried in the acoustic signal overrides listeners’ initial expectations about the speaker’s social group membership derived from the visual prime and generates the testable hypothesis that social information primarily influences the initial phase of exposure, a phase that aggregate measures systematically miss.
