Dominic Watt
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 5191035 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Dominic Watt |
| NOMBRES | Dominic |
| APELLIDO | Watt |
| FIRMA | WATT D |
| AFILIACIONES | University of York |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0978-9282 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 19 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 106 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 18 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2000 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 6 |
Dialectism
Dialectism is a form of prejudice grounded in antipathy towards a particular dialect, or dialects in general. These negative attitudes can lead to discriminatory practices with the potential for serious impact on the life chances of dialect users. The chapter explores aspects of the background to dialectism in the English-speaking world, drawing a particular focus on historical and contemporary attitudes towards Scots in Scotland. Scots has for s…
Accent Bias and Perceptions of Professional Competence in England
Unequal outcomes in professional hiring for individuals from less privileged backgrounds have been widely reported in England. Although accent is one of the most salient signals of such a background, its role in unequal professional outcomes remains underexamined. This paper reports on a large-scale study of contemporary attitudes to accents in England. A large representative sample ( N = 848) of the population in England judged the interview per…
Assessing the effects of accent-mismatched reference population databases on the performance of an automatic speaker recognition system
Automatic Speaker Recognition (ASR) systems are designed to provide the user with statistics relating to the similarity of two or more speech samples and to the typicality of those shared features in the wider population. When an ASR system is used as part of a forensic investigation, the user must decide what counts as the appropriate ‘wider population’ and select a reference database accordingly. While it has generally been held that the voices…
Who owns your voice? Linguistic and legal perspectives on the relationship between vocal distinctiveness and the rights of the individual speaker
Only in very recent times has the concept of ‘ownership’ of a human voice begun to demand proper consideration in terms of its legal implications. The current lack of clarity with respect to the rights afforded to individuals and organisations in this area is something that must be addressed as a matter of some urgency, given that voice samples are now collected on an unprecedented scale, with or without the knowledge or consent of the person(s) …
Methods for the study of accent bias and access to elite professions
Fair access to employment is vital for improving social mobility in Britain today. As language is not explicitly protected by the Equality Act 2010, accent can become a proxy for other forms of discrimination at key junctures for social mobility such as recruiting to elite professions. The Accent Bias and Fair Access in Britain project (www.accentbiasbritain.org) aims to assess prevailing attitudes to accents in Britain and to assess the extent t…
Handbook of Dialectology
Sub-regional ‘other-accent’ effects on lay listeners’ speaker identification abilities
Previous studies have shown that listeners perform worse in speaker identification experiments when they are unfamiliar with the accents of the speakers. Such effects have been documented for listeners hearing unfamiliar foreign languages (language familiarity effect) and unfamiliar regional accents (‘other-accent’ effect). The present study investigates the ‘other-accent’ effect at a sub-regional level. Listeners from three different localities …
The Handbook of Dialectology
Scottish, English, British
This paper reviews techniques used in the direct, quantitative measurement of attitudes, before discussing the advantages of employing Visual Analog Scales. Innovative uses of these methods were developed for utilization in the large‐scale sociophonetic study Accent and Identity on the Scottish/English Border . The paper presents the ‘Attitude Analog Scale’ and the ‘Relational Analog Scale’, which were devised as a way of examining attitudes towa…
The Identification of the Individual Through Speech
Language and Identities
GBS_insertPreviewButtonPopup('ISBN:9780748635771); This volume offers a broad survey of our current state of knowledge on the connections between variability in language use and the construction, negotiation, maintenance and performance of identities. Bringing together the expertise of distinguished international scholars in specially commissioned chapters, the book provides a thematic reader and essential resource for advanced students and resea…
A comparison of three speaker-intrinsic vowel formant frequency normalization algorithms for sociophonetics
This article evaluates a speaker-intrinsic vowel formant frequency normalization algorithm initially proposed in Watt & Fabricius (2002). We compare how well this routine, known as the S -centroid procedure, performs as a sociophonetic research tool in three ways: reducing variance in area ratios of vowel spaces (by attempting to equalize vowel space areas); improving overlap of vowel polygons; and reproducing relative positions of vowel means wi…
Linguistic Accommodation and the Salience of National Identity Markers in a Border Town
This study tests the extent of speakers' linguistic accommodation to members of putative in-groups and out-groups in a border locality where such categorizations can be said to be particularly accentuated. Variation in the speech of informants in dialect contact interactions with separate interviewers is analyzed for evidence of speech accommodation in the form of phonological convergence or divergence. The data do not support a straightforward i…
Language Variation – European Perspectives
Phonological Variation in Child-Directed Speech
Segmental features of child-directed speech (CDS) were studied in a corpus drawn from thirtynine mothers living in Tyneside, England. Focus was on the phonetic variants used for (t) in word-medial and word-final prevocalic contexts since it is known that these variants display clear sociolinguistic patterning in the adult community. Variant usage in CDS was found to differ markedly from that in interadult speech. Effects were also found with resp…
Tyneside English
Tyneside English (TE) is spoken in Newcastle upon Tyne, a city of around 260,000 inhabitants in the far north of England, and in the conurbation stretching east and south of Newcastle along the valley of the River Tyne as far as the North Sea. The total population of this conurbation, which also subsumes Gateshead, Jarrow, North and South Shields, Whitley Bay, and Tynemouth, exceeds 800,000. The transcription is based on the speech of a 24-year o…
I don't speak with a Geordie accent, I speak, like, the Northern accent
Evidence is presented in this paper of the levelling of the Tyneside (Newcastle) English vowel system toward that of a putative regional standard. This process is hypothesised to follow from the fragmentation of tight-knit urban communities that formed after large-scale immigration to Tyneside from elsewhere in the British Isles during the 18th and 19th centuries. High levels of dialect contact brought about by this influx are argued to have prom…
A spectrographic analysis of vowel fronting in Bradford English
The /o/ vowel in the English of Bradford is produced by many speakers as a monophthong with a clearly fronted or central quality. Description of such a pronunciation is, however, all but absent from the literature, suggesting that such pronunciations are a relatively recent development in Bradford speech. The acoustic characteristics of 337 tokens of /o/ are investigated, with a view to matching acoustic cues to the auditory impression of frontin…
Phonetic parallels between the close-mid vowels of Tyneside English
The distribution of variants of the face and goat vowels in Tyneside English (TE) is assessed with reference to the age, sex, and social class of 32 adult TE speakers. The effects of phonological context and speaking style are also examined. Patterns in the data are suggestive of dialect leveling, whereby localized speech variants become recessive and pronunciations typical of a wider geographical area are adopted. Within this broad pattern, howe…
I don't speak with a Geordie accent, I speak, like, the Northern accent
Evidence is presented in this paper of the levelling of the Tyneside (Newcastle) English vowel system toward that of a putative regional standard. This process is hypothesised to follow from the fragmentation of tight-knit urban communities that formed after large-scale immigration to Tyneside from elsewhere in the British Isles during the 18th and 19th centuries. High levels of dialect contact brought about by this influx are argued to have prom…
Phonological Variation in Child-Directed Speech
Segmental features of child-directed speech (CDS) were studied in a corpus drawn from thirtynine mothers living in Tyneside, England. Focus was on the phonetic variants used for (t) in word-medial and word-final prevocalic contexts since it is known that these variants display clear sociolinguistic patterning in the adult community. Variant usage in CDS was found to differ markedly from that in interadult speech. Effects were also found with resp…
A comparison of three speaker-intrinsic vowel formant frequency normalization algorithms for sociophonetics
This article evaluates a speaker-intrinsic vowel formant frequency normalization algorithm initially proposed in Watt & Fabricius (2002). We compare how well this routine, known as the S -centroid procedure, performs as a sociophonetic research tool in three ways: reducing variance in area ratios of vowel spaces (by attempting to equalize vowel space areas); improving overlap of vowel polygons; and reproducing relative positions of vowel means wi…
Phonetic parallels between the close-mid vowels of Tyneside English
The distribution of variants of the face and goat vowels in Tyneside English (TE) is assessed with reference to the age, sex, and social class of 32 adult TE speakers. The effects of phonological context and speaking style are also examined. Patterns in the data are suggestive of dialect leveling, whereby localized speech variants become recessive and pronunciations typical of a wider geographical area are adopted. Within this broad pattern, howe…
Linguistic Accommodation and the Salience of National Identity Markers in a Border Town
This study tests the extent of speakers' linguistic accommodation to members of putative in-groups and out-groups in a border locality where such categorizations can be said to be particularly accentuated. Variation in the speech of informants in dialect contact interactions with separate interviewers is analyzed for evidence of speech accommodation in the form of phonological convergence or divergence. The data do not support a straightforward i…
Tyneside English
Tyneside English (TE) is spoken in Newcastle upon Tyne, a city of around 260,000 inhabitants in the far north of England, and in the conurbation stretching east and south of Newcastle along the valley of the River Tyne as far as the North Sea. The total population of this conurbation, which also subsumes Gateshead, Jarrow, North and South Shields, Whitley Bay, and Tynemouth, exceeds 800,000. The transcription is based on the speech of a 24-year o…
A spectrographic analysis of vowel fronting in Bradford English
The /o/ vowel in the English of Bradford is produced by many speakers as a monophthong with a clearly fronted or central quality. Description of such a pronunciation is, however, all but absent from the literature, suggesting that such pronunciations are a relatively recent development in Bradford speech. The acoustic characteristics of 337 tokens of /o/ are investigated, with a view to matching acoustic cues to the auditory impression of frontin…
Methods for the study of accent bias and access to elite professions
Fair access to employment is vital for improving social mobility in Britain today. As language is not explicitly protected by the Equality Act 2010, accent can become a proxy for other forms of discrimination at key junctures for social mobility such as recruiting to elite professions. The Accent Bias and Fair Access in Britain project (www.accentbiasbritain.org) aims to assess prevailing attitudes to accents in Britain and to assess the extent t…
Phonetic parallels between the close-mid vowels of Tyneside English
The distribution of variants of the face and goat vowels in Tyneside English (TE) is assessed with reference to the age, sex, and social class of 32 adult TE speakers. The effects of phonological context and speaking style are also examined. Patterns in the data are suggestive of dialect leveling, whereby localized speech variants become recessive and pronunciations typical of a wider geographical area are adopted. Within this broad pattern, howe…
A spectrographic analysis of vowel fronting in Bradford English
The /o/ vowel in the English of Bradford is produced by many speakers as a monophthong with a clearly fronted or central quality. Description of such a pronunciation is, however, all but absent from the literature, suggesting that such pronunciations are a relatively recent development in Bradford speech. The acoustic characteristics of 337 tokens of /o/ are investigated, with a view to matching acoustic cues to the auditory impression of frontin…
I don't speak with a Geordie accent, I speak, like, the Northern accent
Evidence is presented in this paper of the levelling of the Tyneside (Newcastle) English vowel system toward that of a putative regional standard. This process is hypothesised to follow from the fragmentation of tight-knit urban communities that formed after large-scale immigration to Tyneside from elsewhere in the British Isles during the 18th and 19th centuries. High levels of dialect contact brought about by this influx are argued to have prom…
Tyneside English
Tyneside English (TE) is spoken in Newcastle upon Tyne, a city of around 260,000 inhabitants in the far north of England, and in the conurbation stretching east and south of Newcastle along the valley of the River Tyne as far as the North Sea. The total population of this conurbation, which also subsumes Gateshead, Jarrow, North and South Shields, Whitley Bay, and Tynemouth, exceeds 800,000. The transcription is based on the speech of a 24-year o…
Phonological Variation in Child-Directed Speech
Segmental features of child-directed speech (CDS) were studied in a corpus drawn from thirtynine mothers living in Tyneside, England. Focus was on the phonetic variants used for (t) in word-medial and word-final prevocalic contexts since it is known that these variants display clear sociolinguistic patterning in the adult community. Variant usage in CDS was found to differ markedly from that in interadult speech. Effects were also found with resp…
Language Variation – European Perspectives
A comparison of three speaker-intrinsic vowel formant frequency normalization algorithms for sociophonetics
This article evaluates a speaker-intrinsic vowel formant frequency normalization algorithm initially proposed in Watt & Fabricius (2002). We compare how well this routine, known as the S -centroid procedure, performs as a sociophonetic research tool in three ways: reducing variance in area ratios of vowel spaces (by attempting to equalize vowel space areas); improving overlap of vowel polygons; and reproducing relative positions of vowel means wi…
Linguistic Accommodation and the Salience of National Identity Markers in a Border Town
This study tests the extent of speakers' linguistic accommodation to members of putative in-groups and out-groups in a border locality where such categorizations can be said to be particularly accentuated. Variation in the speech of informants in dialect contact interactions with separate interviewers is analyzed for evidence of speech accommodation in the form of phonological convergence or divergence. The data do not support a straightforward i…
The Identification of the Individual Through Speech
Language and Identities
GBS_insertPreviewButtonPopup('ISBN:9780748635771); This volume offers a broad survey of our current state of knowledge on the connections between variability in language use and the construction, negotiation, maintenance and performance of identities. Bringing together the expertise of distinguished international scholars in specially commissioned chapters, the book provides a thematic reader and essential resource for advanced students and resea…
Scottish, English, British
This paper reviews techniques used in the direct, quantitative measurement of attitudes, before discussing the advantages of employing Visual Analog Scales. Innovative uses of these methods were developed for utilization in the large‐scale sociophonetic study Accent and Identity on the Scottish/English Border . The paper presents the ‘Attitude Analog Scale’ and the ‘Relational Analog Scale’, which were devised as a way of examining attitudes towa…
The Handbook of Dialectology
Handbook of Dialectology
Sub-regional ‘other-accent’ effects on lay listeners’ speaker identification abilities
Previous studies have shown that listeners perform worse in speaker identification experiments when they are unfamiliar with the accents of the speakers. Such effects have been documented for listeners hearing unfamiliar foreign languages (language familiarity effect) and unfamiliar regional accents (‘other-accent’ effect). The present study investigates the ‘other-accent’ effect at a sub-regional level. Listeners from three different localities …
Methods for the study of accent bias and access to elite professions
Fair access to employment is vital for improving social mobility in Britain today. As language is not explicitly protected by the Equality Act 2010, accent can become a proxy for other forms of discrimination at key junctures for social mobility such as recruiting to elite professions. The Accent Bias and Fair Access in Britain project (www.accentbiasbritain.org) aims to assess prevailing attitudes to accents in Britain and to assess the extent t…
Assessing the effects of accent-mismatched reference population databases on the performance of an automatic speaker recognition system
Automatic Speaker Recognition (ASR) systems are designed to provide the user with statistics relating to the similarity of two or more speech samples and to the typicality of those shared features in the wider population. When an ASR system is used as part of a forensic investigation, the user must decide what counts as the appropriate ‘wider population’ and select a reference database accordingly. While it has generally been held that the voices…
Who owns your voice? Linguistic and legal perspectives on the relationship between vocal distinctiveness and the rights of the individual speaker
Only in very recent times has the concept of ‘ownership’ of a human voice begun to demand proper consideration in terms of its legal implications. The current lack of clarity with respect to the rights afforded to individuals and organisations in this area is something that must be addressed as a matter of some urgency, given that voice samples are now collected on an unprecedented scale, with or without the knowledge or consent of the person(s) …
Accent Bias and Perceptions of Professional Competence in England
Unequal outcomes in professional hiring for individuals from less privileged backgrounds have been widely reported in England. Although accent is one of the most salient signals of such a background, its role in unequal professional outcomes remains underexamined. This paper reports on a large-scale study of contemporary attitudes to accents in England. A large representative sample ( N = 848) of the population in England judged the interview per…
Dialectism
Dialectism is a form of prejudice grounded in antipathy towards a particular dialect, or dialects in general. These negative attitudes can lead to discriminatory practices with the potential for serious impact on the life chances of dialect users. The chapter explores aspects of the background to dialectism in the English-speaking world, drawing a particular focus on historical and contemporary attitudes towards Scots in Scotland. Scots has for s…
Linguistics (16 obras) · Linguistic Variation and Morphology (13 obras) · Psychology (11 obras) · Computer Science (8 obras) · Phonetics and Phonology Research (7 obras) · Philosophy (6 obras) · Sociology (6 obras) · Geography (4 obras) · History (4 obras) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (4 obras)