Andy Gibson, PhD, GradDipMus

Profile

I am a sociophonetician with an interest in how we perceive and make use of the highly nuanced interconnections between fine-grained phonetic variation and variation in other aspects of our experience. My MPhil (supervised by Allan Bell) and PhD (supervised by Jen Hay) looked at the prevalence of American-accented singing in New Zealand, documenting how ‘Pop Song English’ is a context-dependent default in both the production and perception of sung voice for New Zealanders. These projects were part of a wider interest in the validity of performed and mediated data for sociolinguistic research, as explored in a 2011 theme issue of the Journal of Sociolinguistics co-edited with Allan Bell.

As a post-doctoral research fellow at Macquarie University in Sydney, I worked on an Australian Research Council funded project led by Felicity Cox and Jonathan Harrington entitled ‘Child speech, community diversity and the emergence of sound change’. This project investigated how changes in progress in Australian English are developing for children with different language backgrounds and in more or less ethnolinguistically diverse neighbourhoods. 

Research

Research Interests:

• Sociophonetics
• Speech perception
• Accents in popular music
• Varieties of English in New Zealand, Australia and London
• Child speech
• Language and dialect contact

Publications

• White, H., Penney, J., Gibson, A., Szakay, A., & Cox, F. (2024). Influence of pitch and speaker gender on perception of creaky voice. Journal of Phonetics, 102, Advance online publication. DOI: 10.1016/j.wocn.2023.101293
• Penney, J., Cox, F., & Gibson, A. (2024). Hiatus resolution and linguistic diversity in Australian English. Phonetica, 81(2), 119-152. DOI: 10.1515/phon-2023-0029 
• Gibson, A. 2023. Pop Song English as a Supralocal Norm. Language in Society.
• Gibson, A. Forthcoming. The PoPS Corpus: Structured Variation in the Phonetics of Popular Song. In M. Yaeger-Dror, C. Cieri, L. Hall-Lew & K. Drager (Eds.), Dimensions of Linguistic Variation. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press.
• Szakay, A., A. Gibson. Forthcoming. Māori and Pasifika English in New Zealand. In Hickey, R. & K. Burridge (Eds.), New Cambridge History of the English Language. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
• Gibson, A., J. Penney, F. Cox. 2022. Rhoticity and hiatus breaking in Australian English: Associations with community diversity. Proceedings of Speech Science Technology.
• White, H., J. Penney, A. Gibson, A. Szakay, & F. Cox. 2022. Evaluating automatic creaky voice detection methods. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 152(3), 1476-1486.
• Penney, J., A. Gibson, F. Cox, M. Proctor, & A. Szakay. 2021. A comparison of acoustic correlates of voice quality across different recording devices: a cautionary tale. Paper presented at INTERSPEECH.
• White, H., J. Penney, A. Gibson, A. Szakay, & F. Cox. 2021. Optimizing an automatic creaky voice detection method for Australian English-speaking females. Paper presented at the INTERSPEECH (22nd: 2021).
• Gibson, A. 2021. Richard J. Watts & Franz Andres Morrissey, Language, the singer and the song: The sociolinguistics of folk performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. xviii, 372. Hb.£ 95. Language in Society, 50(3), 475-479.
• Gibson, A. 2020. Sociophonetics of Popular Music: Insights from Corpus Analysis and Speech Perception Experiments. PhD dissertation, University of Canterbury, New Zealand.
• Hay, J., K. Drager, A. Gibson. 2018. Hearing r-sandhi: The role of past experience. Language, 94: 360–404. doi:10.1353/lan.2018.0020
• Warren, P., A. Gibson, J. Hay. 2017. The sound of women in New Zealand English. In M. Marra & P. Warren (Eds.), Linguist at Work: Festschrift for Janet Holmes. Wellington: Victoria University Press.
• Gibson, A. 2016. Samoan English in New Zealand: Examples of consonant features from the UC QuakeBox. New Zealand English Journal, 29&30: 25–50.
• Starks, D., A. Gibson, A. Bell. 2015. ‘Pasifika Englishes in New Zealand’. In J. P. Williams et al (Eds.), Further Studies in the Lesser-Known Varieties of English, pp. 288–304. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
• Gibson, A., & A. Bell. 2012. ‘Popular Music Singing as Referee Design’. In J. M. Hernández-Campoy and J. A. Cutillas- Espinosa (Eds.), Style-Shifting in Public: New Perspectives on Stylistic Variation, pp. 139–164. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
• Gibson, A. 2011. Flight of the Conchords: Recontextualizing the Voices of Popular Culture. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 15: 603–626.
• Bell, A., & A. Gibson. 2011. Staging language: An introduction to the sociolinguistics of performance. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 15: 555–572.
• Bell, A., & A. Gibson (eds.). 2011. The Sociolinguistics of Performance. Theme issue of the Journal of Sociolinguistics, 15(5).
• Gibson, A., & A. Bell. 2010. Performing Pasifika English in New Zealand: The case of bro’Town. English World-Wide, 31: 231–251.
• Gibson, A. 2010. Production and Perception of Vowels in New Zealand Popular Music. MPhil Thesis, Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand.
• Gibson, A. 2010. Review of Jennifer Hay, Margaret Maclagan, Elizabeth Gordon. 2008. ‘New Zealand English’. English World-Wide, 31: 103–107.
• Gibson, A. 2010. ‘New Zealand identity in popular music: Vowel differences between singing and speaking’. In H. Johnson (Ed.), Many Voices: Music and National Identity in Aotearoa/New Zealand, pp. 111–121. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
• Bell, A. & A. Gibson. 2008. Stopping and Fronting in New Zealand Pasifika English. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics, 14(2): 43–52.
• Gibson, A. 2005. Non-Prevocalic /r/ in New Zealand Hip-Hop. New Zealand English Journal, 19: 5–12.