Speech Intelligibility Clinic at The University of Newcastle

This week I visited Helen Blake who leads the Speech Intelligibility Clinic at the University of Newcastle. Helen is my PhD student and some of her PhD is based around her work in the clinic. She also works in the clinic one day per week supervising speech pathology students providing intelligibility enhancement to staff and students. They also support the students at ELICOS (English Language Intensive Courses for Overseas Students).

Helen brings a wide range of specialist skills to her role and studies. As well as being a speech pathologist, she has been an air traffic control standarization officer, and has learned  nine languages (Latin, French, German, Spanish, Japanese, Russian, Polish, Mandarin, Hebrew). As part of her PhD Helen has already published two journal articles and has written an encyclopedia entry:

• Blake, H. L. & McLeod, S. (2017, accepted for publication). Intelligibility enhancement. In M. J. Ball & J. S. Damico (Eds.), The SAGE encyclopedia of human communication sciences and disorders. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. 
• Blake, H. L., Bennetts Kneebone, L. & McLeod, S. (2017, in press). The effect of oral English proficiency on humanitarian migrants’ experiences of settling in Australia. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. doi: 10.1080/13670050.2017.1294557 
• Blake, H. L., McLeod, S., Verdon, S. & Fuller, G. (2016, in press). The relationship between spoken English proficiency and participation in higher education, employment, and income from two Australian censuses. International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology. doi: 10.1080/17549507.2016.1229031

While I was visiting the University of Newcastle, I also gave a lecture to staff and students who were on campus and via video conference to clinical sites around Newcastle (and beyond). The attendees were enthusiastic about the free resources available on the Multilingual Children's Speech website.

Helen (at the far end of the table) with speech pathology students at the Speech Intelligibility Clinic

Some of the audience who attended my presentation at the University of Newcastle

Features of the Bristol accent

I have spent the week in Bristol and have enjoyed hearing the Bristolian accent. Here is a summary of some of the features, as outlined by Yvonne Wren and colleagues in a paper that is currently in submission for publication:

 
Vowels:

1. Use of [ə] for /ʌ/ (as in ‘putt’).

2. Use of [a] for /ɑː/ (as in ‘bath’)

3. Slightly longer or fuller vowels than RP e.g. mad [maˑd]; job [ʤɑˑb]; also - bucket [bəˑkɪˑʔ] rather than /bʌkɪˑʔ/; goodness [ˈgʊdnɛs] rather than /gʊdnəs/ or /gʊdnɪs/.

Consonants:

1. Post vocalic /ɹ/ as in [fɑɹm]

2. Presence of /l/ following word final /ə/ (as in ‘Americal’) and also medially in e.g. ‘drawling’ and ‘chimley’. (This is a feature known as Bristol ‘l’ and is confined to the local area of Bristol. ‘Eva’ and ‘evil’ would be homonyms in a child who shows this feature.)

3. Use of [f] for /θ/

4. Use of glottal stop for /t/ before a pause e.g. Pete – [piːʔ]