Bulletin

Issue: July 2005

News

Just you wait, Henry Higgins – Change in the rules of phonetics

British phonetician, Professor Henry Sweet – on whom George Bernard Shaw based Professor Henry Higgins of Pygmalion - My Fair Lady fame – was a pioneer of the science of phonetics.

A century later La Trobe University speech researcher, Dr Marija Tabain and colleagues, are helping to refine the rules of this discipline.

As in many fields, years of investigations by researchers in phonetics led to the build-up of ideas and theories which have become the norm.

Then along came Dr Tabain – a phonetician like Henry Higgins – who has discovered something that casts doubt on one aspect of previously held dogma. This happened when Dr Tabain began studying the language of the Arrernte people of Central Australia.

A lecturer in Linguistics, Dr Tabain found that at least one aspect of the way the Arrernte people speak is different to that of most known languages: their ‘articulatory strategies’ to produce consonants, compared with speakers of European and most other languages.

In collaboration with Mr Gavan Breen of the Institute for Aboriginal Development, Alice Springs, and Professor Andy Butcher of Flinders University, Adelaide, she is putting together the foundations of normal speech in the Arrernte language.

While in the short term it is a purely academic exercise in phonetics, Dr Tabain says eventually it could lead to improvements in the methods of detecting and treating speech problems.

‘There will be applications for speech therapy because until now it was assumed that Aboriginal language speakers adopt the same articulatory strategies as European language speakers,’ Dr Tabain said.

‘For instance, speakers of European languages control the movement out of a consonant much more carefully than the movement into a consonant, whereas Aboriginal language speakers control both the movement into and the movement out of the consonant.

‘From studies of European and Asian languages, we always thought that this aspect of consonant production was based on biological limits on speech such as jaw mechanics. This biological limit was believed to be one basis for the strong preference in the world’s languages for words that begin with a consonant and end with a vowel.

‘But we now know that it is possible for speakers to control all aspects of the speech movement equally carefully, and Aboriginal language speakers seem to have a particular need to control consonants more than European language speakers do, since Aboriginal languages tend to make a lot of consonant contrasts that European languages don’t.

‘The only other languages in the world that have the same contrasts are the Indian languages, so we suspect that speakers of Indian languages adopt similar articulatory strategies to Aboriginal language speakers.’

Dr Tabain worked with speakers of Arrernte around Alice Springs, Yanyuwa in Borroloola near the Gulf of Carpentaria in the Northern Territory, and Yindjibarndi, in the Kimberley near Roebourne, West Australia.

In collaboration with the University of Western Sydney and Macquarie University, the team flew a group of Arrernte women– a grand-mother, two daughters, and two grand-daughters – to Sydney for recording with Electro Magnetic Mid Sagittal Articulography. This enables researchers to trace the position of the tongue, lips and jaw when the speaker pronounces certain sounds.

‘Phonetics is a very important part of linguistics and it slots in with many other disciplines such as psychology, speech pathology and computer science,’ Dr Tabain added.

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