Vowel transcription systems: An Australian perspective FELICITY COX Macquarie University, Australia Abstract Transcription is an essential clinical tool for speech-language pathologists as it provides a permanent written record of communicative behaviour and forms an important source of data for analysis, interpretation, decision making, and dissemination. One of the responsibilities in speech-language pathology is to faithfully capture the speech production characteristics of clinical populations so that informed management decisions may be made. Notation systems that are appropriately suited for this purpose are mandatory. In Australia today, the conventional phonemic transcription system was first described over 60 years ago. However, an alternative to this traditional system has more recently been proposed by Harrington, Cox and Evans (HCE). This paper details the HCE system and argues its advantage as a clinical tool for speech- language pathologists in Australia. This new system provides a more accurate phonetically oriented foundation against which atypical vowel production can be assessed. It is further argued that the HCE system can form the basis for narrower phonetic examination and has pedagogical value in the description of Standard Australian English. Keywords: Phonetics, transcription, vowels, Australian English, speech-language pathology. Introduction Creating a transcript involves the process of inter- preting and accurately translating language beha- viour to produce a written record that forms a set of data transparently available for subsequent analysis and presentation (Mu ¨ ller & Damico, 2002). The complexity of this process cannot be underestimated and it is important to remain mindful of our responsibility as transcribers to create a record that faithfully represents the speech behaviour of the individual. Mu ¨ ller and Damico (2002, p. 300) caution that transcription that is oversimplified or used ‘‘unthinkingly in a ‘cook-book’ fashion’’ may hinder rather than assist interpretation and analysis. They provide a set of guiding principles to clinical transcription which are underpinned by the require- ment that adequate notation systems are available for explicitly describing the behaviours in question (Mu ¨ ller & Damico, 2002). It is therefore pertinent to periodically re-evaluate traditional transcription practices to maintain quality control and keep abreast of new developments in associated fields to ensure the integrity of our notation systems. With this in mind, the present paper has two broad aims: to provide an evaluation of the traditional phonemic transcription system of Standard Australian English (SAusE) and to outline a recent development that has implications for the transcription of speech in the Australian context. 1 Historical background The phonemic vowel transcription system that is conventionally used for SAusE was first proposed by Mitchell in 1946. It was constructed at a time when SAusE was an exocentric dialect having Received Pronunciation (RP), as its external model. Mitchell’s system is based on this British standard and has been retained for SAusE presumably as a consequence of the historical connection, and resulting equivalence, between the two phonemic systems. RP and SAusE are, however, phonetically quite distinct and much of this difference is carried by the vowels (Horvath, 2004). Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, along with sociopolitical and cultural maturity, SAusE has developed into one of the well-known World Englishes with its own internal norms and standards (Schneider, 2003; Semenets & Rusetskaya, 1991) and is now widely recognized as a major and potent marker of Australian national identity (Butler, 2001). It is against this historical backdrop that evaluation of the Mitchell (1946) transcription system must be made. In Mitchell and Correspondence: Felicity Cox, Centre for Language Sciences, Department of Linguistics, Macquarie University, Sydney, 2109, Australia. Tel: þ61-2-9850-8767. E-mail: fcox@ling.mq.edu.au International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 2008; 10(5): 1 – 7 ISSN 1754-9507 print/ISSN 1754-9515 online ª The Speech Pathology Association of Australia Limited Published by Informa UK Ltd. DOI: 10.1080/17549500701855133 sankarr 26/2/08 10:56 TASL_A_285673 (XML)