Dec 1
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Harrington:2006
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I would like to see a closer definition of vowel shift due to the age
differences/the aging of organs related to those vowels.

About the possibility of a change in speech style, it would also be
interesting to have a report about who was in most contact with the
Queen in each of the time sets (e.g who lived in the palace at the
time, what countries were visited frequently in this time, what age
were the people around her at the time), to see if there could be any
possible influence from that (as is often observed e.g. that in a
group of friends the speech style of the individuals tend to change to
a more similar speech style within the group). This would focus less
on the phonetic aspect, but more on the social context of the speech,
which I think is important to consider in this scenario.

On PDF page three (journal page 441), related work is mentioned where
formant changes were vowel-dependent. Nevertheless, the author takes
the changes of the schwa between Q50 and Q90 as a baseline for
non-phonetic changes between the different /i/ sounds. (How) does he
justify this?

I cannot quite follow why they included F-measure differences in schwa
for „Christmas“ alongside the difference in all contexts. The paper
says that „it cannot be the case that the changes from Q50 to Q90 are
an artefact either of segmental context or of word-level prosody
(given that the changes have been observed in the same word)“ - but
what exactly is meant by that?

In how far is the Queen a suitable test subject in order to
investigate sound changes within a speech community? I would expect
the Queen to predominantly be in contact with other members of the
royal family which means that phonetic changes within the broad
british speech community can hardly affect her.

The corpora that were used were from the 1950s and 1980s/90s. It's
already been a while since then, so would another change possibly have
taken place when comparing the old results to nowadays?

The comparison of the Queen's English to SSB included normalized data,
but could it also be important to consider the raw values of the
formants in comparison to the Queen's? Does the actual value of a
speaker's vowel formants also affect how much they may change?

A couple times in the paper, they mention that the differences they
measured were marginal but statistically significant. Does this imply
that these changes in formants likely don't affect perception? Is it
still a significant result if the end result isn't perceivable?

I would like to better understand the conclusions depend on the
variation of the data in this article, I confused also about the F1 or
F2 lowering of schwa, how exactly do they change.

Usually older people speak in a higher voice so, I expected the
formant frequencies would increase with increasing age but according
to the paper it seems to be the opposite. How are those two phenomena
related to each other?

Besides f0 and f1-f4, which audio features could evidence effect of
aging?

Based on the results of Jonathan Harrington study, can one talk about
a gradual blurring of the boundaries of British English dialects and
the formation of a more or less uniform language standard?

Similar to our discussion about Labov's description of a speech
community that included relatively few number of participants, can we
take the results seen from changes in the Queen's pronunciations of
happY, etc. to be representative of all speakers of RP between the
1950s to the early 2000s?

Wouldn't it be better to do research about other (older, famous)
people, analyse their ways of speaking throughout the years and
compare that to the Queen's, to make a final decision why the
pronounciation of words change? That is, if the interest doesn't lie
on the Queen only, but in older people in general.

Could we get a brief explanation of F2 curvature?
To what extent do you think conclusions can be drawn about the greater
population on an in depth study of a single subject?
What is the significance of the section on New Zealand English in the
discussion (p. 453)