ABSTRACT
Longitudinal analyses in which the speech data from the same individuals is resampled over a long time interval have provided increasing evidence that there can be phonetic shifts even in adulthood. The factors that bring about such changes remain somewhat unclear. Here we seek to shed light on this issue by re-analysing some of the vowels of Queen Elizabeth II from the annual Christmas broadcasts that had previously been shown to shift phonetically between the 1950s and 1980s in the direction of sound change taking place to the standard accent in England (Harrington 2007; Harrington et al. 2005). The more specific tests in the present study were whether there was a continuation of the direction of change in more recent broadcasts and also whether the sound changes were affected by lexical frequency. The vowels analysed acoustically for this purpose were /æ/ (trap), /ɪ:/ (happy), and /u/ (goose). The results showed some evidence for a retrograde change in which their phonetic characteristics beyond 1990 reverted back in the direction of their 1950s qualities. There was no interaction with lexical frequency. The study suggests an adult’s pronunciation in later life may be increasingly affected by the memory of pronunciations from the distant past.
