As many as 20 million Americans claim to be of Scottish or Scots/Irish descent. One of the primary heritage languages of this community is Scottish Gaelic. This language is the medium for a rich culture of literature, song, poetry, history and indigenous knowledge-systems. It also provides an important window into the world-view and culture of the ancestors of the Scottish-American community. Sadly, the Scottish Gaelic language is severely endangered. There are no monolingual speakers and, in Scotland, the number of speakers who use the language everyday has dropped more than a third in the past 30 years. At this rate, the language will no longer be viable within a generation. The potential loss to our understanding of the culture and background of so many Scots and Scottish Americans is of great concern. The Scottish Gaelic language is also of interest to linguists who study the structure of language. The sound system of Gaelic is very different from that of English. It has particular sounds and patterns of sound combinations that are rare or unique in the world's languages. Because linguists seek to understand the fundamental patterns that hold of languages in general it is necessary to look to languages like Scottish Gaelic.
The interests of Scottish Gaelic speakers and scientific linguists intersect in this domain. In order for linguists to properly understand the sound system of a language, they have to use instrumental measures of how speakers articulate sounds and use psycholinguistic experiments to measure how speakers understand and use the patterns of sounds. The patterns in commonly spoken languages like English and Spanish has been relatively well studied but the sound systems of lesser spoken languages with rare sounds, such as Gaelic, are less often addressed. On the other side of the coin, for the speakers of the language, one of the first steps towards building a stable linguistic community is to develop language teaching materials in and about the language for use by the community, both in the USA and in Scotland. Using modern linguistic instrumental and psycholinguistic techniques. Profs. Andrew Carnie, Mike Hammond, Diana Archangeli and Natasha Warner along with Scottish Gaelic native speaker Muriel Fisher will investigate the articulation, patterning and perception of certain unique properties of the Gaelic sound system. For example, using an ultrasound placed under the chin, they will measure the position of the tongue during the pronunciation of certain consonants and vowels. Similarly, they will ask speakers to speak while wearing a special mask that measures how much air is coming through their nose and mouth. The output of this research will be a description of the Gaelic sounds structures which will help complete an on-going description of the language. In addition, in doing this research graduate students will be trained in the techniques of sound analysis of an endangered language. This training will allow the students to do similar work on other endangered heritage languages. This work has important implications for documenting and preserving the linguistic traditions of the Scottish and Scottish-American communities.
This study investigated how humans understand, produce and mentally store speech sounds. We looked at the sound system of Scottish Gaelic, a language very different from English, because it would help us to understand whether speakers of this language use the same kinds of information and techniques as speakers of more familiar languages do. We used a number of psycholinguistic experiments and instrumental measurements to get at this information. We used an ultrasound machine to measure what speakers do with their tongues when they say sounds not found in English. We used psycholinguistic judgment techniques that included interviews and presenting the speakers with subtly manipulated sounds to see how they perceived particular sound patterns, and we used aerodynamic measurements to test the pressure of air through the nose and mouth while speakers were producing sounds that have been claimed to be physically impossible to pronounce. We discovered a number of phonetic "illusions" were at play. First, speakers of the language claim that they produce a nasal fricative sound (essentially a cross between an m and a v pronounced at the same time). Physically this sound should be impossible to pronounce because the amount of air required to produce the v part of the sound is reduced significantly when the air is pushed through the nose (the m part of the sound). We discovered that while speakers often perceive what they are producing are nasal fricatives, what they actually produce involves some compromise in the timing of the articulations. The second illusion we discovered is that certain vowels in the language, which are pronounced but are absent in the spelling (like the second vowel in the English word chasm) have an effect on how speakers percieve the syllable structure of their language. They clearly hear these vowels, but express uncertainty as to whether they "count" as part of the syllable structure in the language or not. These results have an important impact on the science of language knowledge and production because they show how such a different sounding language is processed and produced. Scottish Gaelic is a highly endangered language. Current estimates are that it may not survive as a spoken language past the next generation. By documenting the physical properties of the sound system and by recording the reactions of the speakers to those sounds we are documenting and preserving important data for future scientists interested in this language. In doing these experiments we were also able to train 8 graduate students and 5 undergraduate students and one native speaker of the language in using basic experimental techniques for investigating language structure in a scientific way. In terms of broader impact, by doing these studies and sharing our results with speakers and teachers of the language we help them to develop materials for teaching the language and for preserving it for their children.
