Debbie Loakes
Biographic Data
| ID | 82144 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Debbie Loakes |
| GIVEN NAMES | Debbie |
| FAMILY NAME | Loakes |
| SIGNATURE | LOAKES D |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Melbourne |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7620-3769 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 8 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 13 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2020 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Australian Indian English: Contact-Induced Adaptation in the Perception of Vowel Categories
Increased global mobility has intensified contact between regional English varieties, creating new opportunities for large-scale second dialect acquisition. Australia, with its rapidly growing population due to migration, offers a particularly dynamic context for exploring such contact. This study investigates how first-generation Indian migrants in the Australian city of Melbourne perceive Australian English vowels in the lexical items dress and…
T/ Production in Mainstream and Aboriginal Australian Englishes in Warrnambool and Mildura: A Sociophonetic Acoustic Study
A sociophonetic study of coda /t/ in Australian Englishes spoken in Warrnambool and Mildura, Victoria, Australia, is described. A total of 2112 coda /t/ tokens produced by 61 adult L1 speakers was analyzed using auditory and acoustic profiling, focusing on four social factors (location, dialect, age and gender). The corpus included 33 Aboriginal English and 28 Mainstream Australian English speakers (24 male, 37 female) who fell into roughly equal…
Introduction: Perceptions and attitudes in linguistically diverse contexts
The focus of this special issue of the Australian Journal of Linguistics is the study of perceptions of and attitudes towards English in linguistically diverse contexts, representing research condu...
Do Australians hear ethnicity
Changes in migration alter the linguistic ecology of countries, giving rise to hybrid social identities and ethnically marked ways of speaking (‘ethnolects’). Studies of Australian English ethnolects focus on linguistic production, but we do not know whether Australians can identify ethnicity based on speech, the social and personal characteristics they attribute to ways of speaking, and what linguistic features they pick up on. We used stimuli e…
A Description of Hobart English Monophthongs: Vowel and Voice Quality
This study focuses on vowel variation in Mainstream Australian English, describing F1/F2 vowel spaces and voice quality produced by speakers from the capital, Hobart, of the island state of Tasmania. Vowels are analysed by comparing F1/F2 vowel spaces produced by 39 male and female speakers, divided into younger and older age groups. Voice quality is measured by acoustic analysis of H1*-H2* as well as CPP. Results for vowel quality show that vowe…
Automatic speech recognition and the transcription of indistinct forensic audio: How do the new generation of systems fare
This study provides an update on an earlier study in the “Capturing Talk” research topic, which aimed to demonstrate how automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems work with indistinct forensic-like audio, in comparison with good-quality audio. Since that time, there has been rapid technological advancement, with newer systems having access to extremely large language models and having their performance proclaimed as being human-like in accuracy.…
Sociophonetic Variation in Vowel Categorization of Australian English
This study involves a perceptual categorization task for Australian English, designed to investigate regional and social variation in category boundaries between close-front vowel contrasts. Data are from four locations in southeast Australia. A total of 81 listeners from two listener groups took part: (a) so-called mainstream Australian English listeners from all four locations, and (b) L1 Aboriginal English listeners from one of the locations. …
Acoustic Analysis of Vowels in Australian Aboriginal English Spoken in Victoria
1) Background: Australian Aboriginal English (AAE) is a variety known to differ in various ways from the mainstream, but to date very little phonetic analysis has been carried out. This study is a description of L1 Aboriginal English in southern Australia, aiming to comprehensively describe the acoustics of vowels, focusing in particular on vowels known to be undergoing change in Mainstream Australian English. Previous work has focused on static …
Attitudes towards Indian English among young urban professionals in Hyderabad, India
Despite extensive work on the description of Indian English(es), only limited attention has been paid to attitudes towards the variety among its speakers. This paper reports on semi‐structured interviews eliciting language attitudes with 32 educated young students and professionals in Hyderabad, India. Results reveal that Indian English is occupying an increasingly legitimate position within the popular consciousness, and that there is an increas…
Does Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) Have a Role in the Transcription of Indistinct Covert Recordings for Forensic Purposes
The transcription of covert recordings used as evidence in court is a huge issue for forensic linguistics. Covert recordings are typically made under conditions in which the device needs to be hidden, and so the resulting speech is generally indistinct, with overlapping voices and background noise, and in many cases the acoustic record cannot be analyzed via conventional phonetic techniques (i.e. phonetic segments are unclear, or there are no cue…
New insights into /el/-/æl/ merging in Australian English
A merger exists in Australian English in which /el/ is realized as [æl] for a number of speakers, particularly in Victoria. There have also been some observations of /æl/ raising to [el], termed “transposition”. Although thought to be characteristic of older speakers, empirical evidence for transposition is scant. Here we report the discovery of substantive degrees of merging in thirteen older speakers, aged between 51 and 80, from Ocean Grove, V…
They Talk Muṯumuṯu: Variable Elision of Tense Suffixes in Contemporary Pitjantjatjara
Vowel elision is common in Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara connected speech. It also appears to be a locus of language change, with young people extending elision to new contexts; resulting in a distinctive style of speech which speakers refer to as muṯumuṯu (‘short’ speech). This study examines the productions of utterance-final past tense suffixes /-nu, -ɳu, -ŋu/ by four older and four younger Pitjantjatjara speakers in spontaneous speech. T…
Acoustic injustice: The experience of listening to indistinct covert recordings presented as evidence in court
Audio recorded by hidden listening devices can provide powerful evidence in criminal trials. Unfortunately these covert recordings are often indistinct, to the extent the court needs a transcript to understand the content. Australian law allows police to provide transcripts as ‘ad hoc experts’. Legal procedures incorporate safeguards intended to ensure the transcripts are not misleading. The problem is that these safeguards have been shown to be …
Acoustic Analysis of Vowels in Australian Aboriginal English Spoken in Victoria
1) Background: Australian Aboriginal English (AAE) is a variety known to differ in various ways from the mainstream, but to date very little phonetic analysis has been carried out. This study is a description of L1 Aboriginal English in southern Australia, aiming to comprehensively describe the acoustics of vowels, focusing in particular on vowels known to be undergoing change in Mainstream Australian English. Previous work has focused on static …
Sociophonetic Variation in Vowel Categorization of Australian English
This study involves a perceptual categorization task for Australian English, designed to investigate regional and social variation in category boundaries between close-front vowel contrasts. Data are from four locations in southeast Australia. A total of 81 listeners from two listener groups took part: (a) so-called mainstream Australian English listeners from all four locations, and (b) L1 Aboriginal English listeners from one of the locations. …
They Talk Muṯumuṯu: Variable Elision of Tense Suffixes in Contemporary Pitjantjatjara
Vowel elision is common in Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara connected speech. It also appears to be a locus of language change, with young people extending elision to new contexts; resulting in a distinctive style of speech which speakers refer to as muṯumuṯu (‘short’ speech). This study examines the productions of utterance-final past tense suffixes /-nu, -ɳu, -ŋu/ by four older and four younger Pitjantjatjara speakers in spontaneous speech. T…
New insights into /el/-/æl/ merging in Australian English
A merger exists in Australian English in which /el/ is realized as [æl] for a number of speakers, particularly in Victoria. There have also been some observations of /æl/ raising to [el], termed “transposition”. Although thought to be characteristic of older speakers, empirical evidence for transposition is scant. Here we report the discovery of substantive degrees of merging in thirteen older speakers, aged between 51 and 80, from Ocean Grove, V…
Acoustic injustice: The experience of listening to indistinct covert recordings presented as evidence in court
Audio recorded by hidden listening devices can provide powerful evidence in criminal trials. Unfortunately these covert recordings are often indistinct, to the extent the court needs a transcript to understand the content. Australian law allows police to provide transcripts as ‘ad hoc experts’. Legal procedures incorporate safeguards intended to ensure the transcripts are not misleading. The problem is that these safeguards have been shown to be …
New insights into /el/-/æl/ merging in Australian English
A merger exists in Australian English in which /el/ is realized as [æl] for a number of speakers, particularly in Victoria. There have also been some observations of /æl/ raising to [el], termed “transposition”. Although thought to be characteristic of older speakers, empirical evidence for transposition is scant. Here we report the discovery of substantive degrees of merging in thirteen older speakers, aged between 51 and 80, from Ocean Grove, V…
They Talk Muṯumuṯu: Variable Elision of Tense Suffixes in Contemporary Pitjantjatjara
Vowel elision is common in Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara connected speech. It also appears to be a locus of language change, with young people extending elision to new contexts; resulting in a distinctive style of speech which speakers refer to as muṯumuṯu (‘short’ speech). This study examines the productions of utterance-final past tense suffixes /-nu, -ɳu, -ŋu/ by four older and four younger Pitjantjatjara speakers in spontaneous speech. T…
Does Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) Have a Role in the Transcription of Indistinct Covert Recordings for Forensic Purposes
The transcription of covert recordings used as evidence in court is a huge issue for forensic linguistics. Covert recordings are typically made under conditions in which the device needs to be hidden, and so the resulting speech is generally indistinct, with overlapping voices and background noise, and in many cases the acoustic record cannot be analyzed via conventional phonetic techniques (i.e. phonetic segments are unclear, or there are no cue…
Attitudes towards Indian English among young urban professionals in Hyderabad, India
Despite extensive work on the description of Indian English(es), only limited attention has been paid to attitudes towards the variety among its speakers. This paper reports on semi‐structured interviews eliciting language attitudes with 32 educated young students and professionals in Hyderabad, India. Results reveal that Indian English is occupying an increasingly legitimate position within the popular consciousness, and that there is an increas…
Automatic speech recognition and the transcription of indistinct forensic audio: How do the new generation of systems fare
This study provides an update on an earlier study in the “Capturing Talk” research topic, which aimed to demonstrate how automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems work with indistinct forensic-like audio, in comparison with good-quality audio. Since that time, there has been rapid technological advancement, with newer systems having access to extremely large language models and having their performance proclaimed as being human-like in accuracy.…
Sociophonetic Variation in Vowel Categorization of Australian English
This study involves a perceptual categorization task for Australian English, designed to investigate regional and social variation in category boundaries between close-front vowel contrasts. Data are from four locations in southeast Australia. A total of 81 listeners from two listener groups took part: (a) so-called mainstream Australian English listeners from all four locations, and (b) L1 Aboriginal English listeners from one of the locations. …
Acoustic Analysis of Vowels in Australian Aboriginal English Spoken in Victoria
1) Background: Australian Aboriginal English (AAE) is a variety known to differ in various ways from the mainstream, but to date very little phonetic analysis has been carried out. This study is a description of L1 Aboriginal English in southern Australia, aiming to comprehensively describe the acoustics of vowels, focusing in particular on vowels known to be undergoing change in Mainstream Australian English. Previous work has focused on static …
A Description of Hobart English Monophthongs: Vowel and Voice Quality
This study focuses on vowel variation in Mainstream Australian English, describing F1/F2 vowel spaces and voice quality produced by speakers from the capital, Hobart, of the island state of Tasmania. Vowels are analysed by comparing F1/F2 vowel spaces produced by 39 male and female speakers, divided into younger and older age groups. Voice quality is measured by acoustic analysis of H1*-H2* as well as CPP. Results for vowel quality show that vowe…
Australian Indian English: Contact-Induced Adaptation in the Perception of Vowel Categories
Increased global mobility has intensified contact between regional English varieties, creating new opportunities for large-scale second dialect acquisition. Australia, with its rapidly growing population due to migration, offers a particularly dynamic context for exploring such contact. This study investigates how first-generation Indian migrants in the Australian city of Melbourne perceive Australian English vowels in the lexical items dress and…
T/ Production in Mainstream and Aboriginal Australian Englishes in Warrnambool and Mildura: A Sociophonetic Acoustic Study
A sociophonetic study of coda /t/ in Australian Englishes spoken in Warrnambool and Mildura, Victoria, Australia, is described. A total of 2112 coda /t/ tokens produced by 61 adult L1 speakers was analyzed using auditory and acoustic profiling, focusing on four social factors (location, dialect, age and gender). The corpus included 33 Aboriginal English and 28 Mainstream Australian English speakers (24 male, 37 female) who fell into roughly equal…
Introduction: Perceptions and attitudes in linguistically diverse contexts
The focus of this special issue of the Australian Journal of Linguistics is the study of perceptions of and attitudes towards English in linguistically diverse contexts, representing research condu...
Do Australians hear ethnicity
Changes in migration alter the linguistic ecology of countries, giving rise to hybrid social identities and ethnically marked ways of speaking (‘ethnolects’). Studies of Australian English ethnolects focus on linguistic production, but we do not know whether Australians can identify ethnicity based on speech, the social and personal characteristics they attribute to ways of speaking, and what linguistic features they pick up on. We used stimuli e…
Linguistic Variation and Morphology (9 works) · Linguistics (8 works) · Phonetics and Phonology Research (7 works) · Australian English (6 works) · Vowel (5 works) · Australian Indigenous Culture and History (4 works) · Computer Science (4 works) · History (4 works) · Multilingual Education and Policy (4 works) · Philosophy (4 works)