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While the loss of regional distinctiveness across the southeastern UK is well studied and largely undisputed, there is less consensus about class-based divisions. This paper investigates this question through an updated analysis of the variety emblematic of Britain’s upper class: Received Pronunciation (RP). While previous studies have suggested levelling in RP to a broader standard southeastern norm, our findings indicate that the most recent advances in the variety show it (re)differentiating itself from other varieties in the region. Investigating both individual vowel movements and broader system-wide properties, we argue that the changes observed in RP today result from speakers adopting a particular articulatory setting (lax voice), which has subsequent ramifications on vowel realizations. We suggest that speakers make strategic use of this articulatory setting as a way of embodying an elite persona in the British context, an interpretation that resonates with the social distributions of similar changes in other varieties.

Purpose: Previous work has shown that monolingual French and English speakers use distinct articulatory settings, the underlying articulatory posture of a language. In the present article, the authors report on an experiment in which they investigated articulatory settings in bilingual speakers. The authors first tested the hypothesis that in order to sound native-like, bilinguals must use distinct, language-specific articulatory settings in monolingual mode. The authors then tested the hypothesis that in bilingual mode, a bilingual individual's articulatory setting is identical to the monolingual-mode setting of 1 of his or her languages. Method: Eight French-English bilinguals each read 90 English and 90 French sentences, and the authors measured their interspeech posture (ISP) using optical tracking of the lips and jaw and ultrasound imaging of the tongue. Results: Results show that bilingual speakers who are perceived as native in both languages exhibit distinct, language-specific ISPs, and those who are not perceived as native in one or more languages do not. In bilingual mode, bilinguals use an ISP that is equivalent to the monolingual-mode ISP of their currently most used language. The most balanced bilingual used a French lip ISP but an English tongue-tip ISP. Conclusion: Results support the claim that bilinguals who sound native in each of their languages have distinct articulatory settings for each language.

This volume brings together six case studies of an adult multilingual speaker who acquires a new language through social interaction. The book deals especially with the multilingual situation, the learner’s acquisitional activities, and the involvement of background languages in the process of speaking. It offers a coherent study of various linguistic phenomena in one individual, including patterns and functions of language switching, word search in interaction, hypothetical construction of words, and articulatory settings in speaking. The main languages involved are English (L1), German (L2) and Swedish (L3). The activation of these languages in the learner’s speech is examined in a cognitive perspective in relation to current models of the speaking process. A longitudinal corpus of NNS–NS conversations covering 21 months from the beginner stage provides the main data for these studies._x000B_Key Features:_x000B_*Presents an example of an active and purposeful language acquirer_x000B_*Explores cross-linguistic influence in a multilingual setting_x000B_*Highlights the significance of prior L2 knowledge in L3 performance_x000B_*Useful for students and researchers interested in second and third language acquisition, individual multilingualism and the human speaking process._x000B_

INTRODUCTIONIt has long been recognised that languages differ phonetically not only in their distinctive segments and prosodic features, but also in the characteristic ways in which the phonetic gestures are ‘set’, i.e. the Artikulationsbasis, articulatory settings (Honikman 1964; Laver 1980), or phonetic settings (Laver 1994). The discussion of Artikulationsbasis has a long history in the phonetic literature, especially from the point of view of the overall characterisation and contrastive description of the pronunciation of different languages (see Kelz 1971; Laver 1978; Jenner 2001 for historical accounts). Not least the great nineteenth-century phoneticians, such as Sievers, Viëtor, Sweet and Jespersen, emphasised and tried to portray cross-language differences concerning basis of articulation. In recent literature in English, the term articulatory settings (introduced by Honikman 1964) is widely used. Laver (1980, 1994) gives an extensive account of various dimensions and values of settings as features of people's habitual voice quality. Although he is primarily concerned with voice phenomena in the individual speaker, he also points out the relevance of settings for the characterisation of specific languages or language varieties (Laver 1994: 423ff). Regional variation of dialects, too, is characterised in part by differences in voice quality, an aspect which Elert has applied to Swedish dialect research (Elert 1984; Elert and Br. Hammarberg 1991). Likewise, voice can be an aspect of sociolectal variation (Esling 1978a, 1978b), and can function as a social marker of the speaker (Trudgill 1974; Laver and Trudgill 1979).

The question addressed by this study was whether native speakers of languages that have a relatively large inventory of vowels maximize the phonetic distance between those vowels by using a relatively wider range of tongue positions than speakers of small-inventory languages. Glossometry was used to measure tongue height in the Spanish vowels /i/, /u/, /a/, /e/, and /o/ and in the English vowels /i/, /u/, /a/, /eI/, and /oU/. These vowels were spoken by eight native speakers each of Spanish and English, normally and with a bite block. The effect of the bite block on average vertical tongue height was negligible, but the tongue was slightly lower in the front of the mouth and higher at the back of the mouth for vowels spoken with, than without, a bite block. Token-to-token variability for vowels spoken in a /b_bV/ context was no greater for the Spanish than for the English subjects despite the smaller vowel inventory of Spanish. The average position of the tongue for the five Spanish and the five English vowels examined did not differ significantly, suggesting that the two languages have the same articulatory “setting”. Despite this, the English subjects produced point vowels with a greater range of vertical tongue positions than the Spanish subjects. Taken together, the results suggest the vowel inventory size may affect the location but not the precision of tongue positioning in vowel production.

While it is well known that languages have different phonemes and phonologies, there is growing interest in the idea that languages may also differ in their 'phonetic setting'. The term 'phonetic setting' refers to a tendency to make the vocal apparatus employ a languagespecific habitual configuration. For example, languages may differ in their degree of lip-rounding, tension of the lips and tongue, jaw position, phonation types, pitch range and register. Such phonetic specifications may be particularly difficult for second language (L2) learners to acquire, yet be easily perceivable by first language (LI) listeners as inappropriate. Techniques that are able to capture whether and how an L2 learner's pronunciation proficiency in their two languages relates to the respective phonetic settings in each language should prove useful for second language research. This article gives an overview of a selection of techniques that can be used to investigate phonetic settings at the articulatory level, such as fleshpoint tracking, ultrasound tongue imaging and electropalatography (EPG), as well as a selection of acoustic measures such as measures of pitch range, long-term average spectra and formants.