Listen carefully to your recordings of the word list and the casual conversation. You should prepare a phonetic transcription of the word lists to hand-in with your report. (Please note, you won't be penalised for any errors in transcribing any of the more difficult vowels and diphthongs from any of the non-RP dialects. If there are non-RP pronunciations of particular sounds that you are unsure of, then simply make the best guess you can, perhaps indicating you think it's quite close to such-and-such an RP sound, or that it seems to be midway between two RP sounds, or a bit more `closed/open' than a related RP vowels, and so on. The same will apply for your transcriptions of words and phrases from the casual conversation.) You will also want to phonetically transcribe, for your own purposes, at least parts of the casual conversation recordings. You might, for example, want to focus on a few hundred words from each speaker and prepare a phonetic transcription of these. (You are invited to hand-in these transcriptions with your report, though this is not a required part of the exercise and WILL NOT be marked as part of the assessment.)
Based on your analysis of the word lists and the casual conversation, compare and contrast your two speakers with respect to the areas of phonetic variation set out below. (Information about these areas is supplied in previous lecture notes and readings, and in the attached handout 'Some key aspects of phonetic variation in English dialects'.) You will need to provide support for your analyses by means of transcriptions of relevant words and phrases from your word list and casual conversations. (You must supply a copy of your recordings on cassette as part of the assignment.) In the case of words from the word list, simply provide the English spelling of the word and your phonetic transcription. In the case of words/phrases from the casual conversation recording, you should provide a transcription, in English spelling (not a phonetic transcript) of the sentence or clause which contains the word or words in question, and then a phonetic transcription of the word itself plus a few words either side of it. For example, to illustrate the pronunciation of the vowels in done and won:
In addressing these areas of variation, please note that you should not only compare and contrast the two speakers, but should describe in some detail how each speaker pronounces the sound or sounds in questions. (You must support your analysis by reference to transcriptions from your recordings, as indicated above.)
You should document this, once again by reference to transcriptions from your recordings. You might also like to try and determine whether there are any patterns in such variation. Perhaps the speakers produces one sound in careful or slow speech (word lists) and another in faster, non-careful speech (casual conversation).
