Week 2: Voice Quality Settings

This is the second week of my deliberate practice on Received Pronunciation, and I will focus on the voice quality settings looking at the lips, tongue, and jaw position. Since my archetype is an audio only, I felt the need to find some videos to help me to see the movement of the lips and also the jaw position when people speaks in Received Pronunciation. For that purpose, I, then, firstly watched several movie trailers, one of which was Jane Eyre. Here is the video:

Also, to help me learned more the voice quality settings of Received Pronunciation, I also watched some video tutorials for this accent. I found some good tutorials, but I think this particular one is the most helpful one for me:

From both the trailer and the tutorial here are the features of Received Pronunciation that I noticed:

Spread Lips 

I noticed from all the videos that I watched, most of the time when the speakers speak, the lips are spread. This is actually a similar feature that American English also has. I learnt from one of the video that I watched that I can try to slightly smile while speaking to keep the lips spread. 

Close Jaw

Unlike American English with the feature of open jaw which is described by Esling and Wong (1983) as chewing gum, British people keep their jaw relatively close. This is not the way I usually talk, so it is quite challenging for me to do.  

Creaky Voice

Another feature that I noticed from the archetype is the creaky phonation resulting from the lowering of the larynx to make lower pitch sounds (Esling & Wong, 1983). 

Falling Intonation

I also noticed the falling intonation at the end of each sentence. Even though American English also has falling intonation feature, RP has a slightly different way of doing this. In RP, the falling intonation is softer at the end. 

Non-Rhoticity

Another distinctive feature of British English is its non-rhoticity, that is, the [r] at the end of words is not pronounced as in far, car, and near. However, if the [r] is not at the end of words, the [r] is still pronounced. In RP, the [r] is R-glides after vowels such as in very, sorry, and carry. 

After I tried for several times to record my voice, here is my final attempt for this week after observing the voice quality setting:

As for next week, I will focus my practice on the consonants of Received Pronunciation.


References:
Esling, J. H., & Wong, R. F. (1983). Voice quality settings and the teaching of pronunciation. Tesol 
        Quarterly, 17(1), 89-95.

Week One: Archetype

This blog is built for a self-tutorial project for Phonological Structures of English Course (LING 6610) at Ohio University over the Spring semester 2016. This course reviews primary features of phonetic/phonology, examines language varieties from a pronunciation perspective, and introduces instructional techniques to the teaching and learning of second language phonology. This self-tutorial blog is one of the assignments for the course. Through this blog, I will note down my weekly progress in a "deliberate practice" of improving my Received Pronunciation (RP). 

Received Pronunciation has been chosen because I was taught mostly by lecturers who spoke British English when I was in my undergraduate study; yet, I could not really speak English using this dialect of English, and it is quite a challenge for me to try to speak English in a Receipt Pronunciation. Also, I am now exposed to American English since I am currently studying in the United States, and learning another dialect of English will certainly broaden my knowledge of English. I would like to learn the differences in terms of various segmental and suprasegmental features between American English and British English. I hope that this would also be beneficial for my students back in Indonesia.  

The target sample or archetype for this deliberate practice is taken from International Dialect of English Archive (IDEA). The audio features a 24-year old white female who was born in North London, but once lived in Scotland for four years. She describes her speech as "Estuary-flavoured RP." She noted that her accent is quite a fluid accent which is common for young people living in the south of England. In this audio recording, she is reading a passage entitled Comma Gets a Cure, and the overal recording lasts for 3:51. However, for this practice, I will only take one minute of that recording from 00:14 to 01:14. Here is the link to the archetype: http://www.dialectsarchive.com/england-72, and here is the transcription of the scripted speech:

Sarah Perry was a veterinary nurse who had been working daily at an old zoo in a deserted district of the territory, so she was very happy to start a new job at a superb private practice in North Square near the Duke Street Tower. That area was much nearer for her and more to her liking. Even so, on her first morning, she felt stressed. She ate a bowl of porridge, checked herself in the mirror and washed her face in a hurry. Then she put on a plain yellow dress and a fleece jacket, picked up her kit and headed for work.

When she got there, there was a woman with a goose waiting for her. The woman gave Sarah an official letter from the vet. The letter implied that the animal could be suffering from a rare form of foot and mouth disease, which was surprising, because normally you would only expect to see it in a dog or a goat. Sarah was sentimental, so this made her feel sorry for the beautiful bird.

Before long, that itchy goose began to strut around the office like a lunatic, which made an unsanitary mess. 


The following is the video of my initial attempt in imitating the archetype:

It was not easy for me to do this initial attempt, and I realize that there are so many things that I need to work on in order to properly imitate the archetype. I certainly need to work on my vowel production, some consonants that are very distinctive in British English, the stress, rhythm, and intonation. In this initial attempt, I can hear that I did not sound like British people at all. When I tried really hard to sound like them, I still feel very strange. It was almost like as if I could not speak English. I am sure that there are more things that I need to work on that I have not been able to detect for the moment, but I will try to find them out over the course of this deliberate practice. For next week, I will try to work on voice quality setting.