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.