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Regional relationships among the low vowels of U.S. English: Evidence from production and perception

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 July 2017

Tyler Kendall  and
Valerie Fridland
Tyler Kendall
Affiliation:
University of Oregon
Valerie Fridland
Affiliation:
University of Nevada, Reno
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Abstract

The unconditioned merger of the low back vowels and the variety of realizations found for the low front vowel have been noted as leading to greater distinctiveness across U.S. English regional dialects. The extent to which the movements of these vowels are related has repeatedly been of interest to dialectology as well as phonological theory. Here, examining production and perception data from speaker-listeners across three major regions of the United States, the relationships among these low vowels within and across regions are investigated. Participants provided speech samples and took part in a vowel identification task, judging vowels along a continuum from /æ/ to /ɑ/. Results of acoustic analysis and statistical analysis of the perception results indicate that a structural relationship between /æ/ and /ɑ/ is maintained across regions and that listeners’ own degree of low back vowel merger predicts their perception of the boundary between /æ/ and /ɑ/.

Type
Research Article
Information
Language Variation and Change , Volume 29 , Issue 2 , July 2017 , pp. 245 - 271
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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