Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-fbnjt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-13T12:25:01.012Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Production and perception of the Pin-Pen merger

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 March 2021

Martha Austen
Martha Austen*
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, The Ohio State University, 300 Oxley Hall, 1712 Neil Avenue, Columbus, OH43210
*
Author for correspondence: Martha Austen, Email: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This study presents the first US-wide survey of the pin-pen merger since Labov, Ash & Boberg (2006). Production and perception data were collected from 277 speakers from across the country, with perception-only data from an additional 94 speakers; these data largely replicated previous findings about the social and geographic distribution of the merger. An examination of production and perception data together showed that near merger—in which speakers cannot hear the difference between pin and pen words, yet pronounce them differently—was relatively common, although this phenomenon has received little attention in the literature on the merger. Additionally, an investigation of how merged speakers phonetically realized their merged pin-pen vowel revealed that, in contrast to previous findings, speakers were equally as likely to merge to [ɛ] (tw[ɛ]n for twin) as they were to [i] (h[i]n for hen). However, there was no apparent social or geographic patterning to this phonetic realization.

Keywords

pin-pen mergernear mergerSouthern EnglishAfrican American Englishphonetic realization
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Linguistic Geography , Volume 8 , Issue 2 , October 2020 , pp. 115 - 126
Check for updates
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Alexander, J. Trent. 2006. Defining the diaspora: Appalachians in the Great Migration. Journal of Interdisciplinary History 37(2). 219–247.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Anderson, Bridget L. 2008. Migration, accommodation, and language change: Language at the intersection of regional and ethnic identity. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Arnold, Lacey. 2015. Multiple mergers: Production and perception of three pre-/l/ mergers in Youngstown, Ohio. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 21(2). 2.Google Scholar
Austen, Martha. 2017. Pinning down social meaning: How listener phonology shapes social perception. Poster presented at New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) 46, Madison, WI, November 2–5. https://www.asc.ohio-state.edu/austen.14/materials/nwav2017_qp2_poster.pdf (7 October, 2020).Google Scholar
Bakos, Jon. 2013. A comparison of the speech patterns and dialect attitudes of Oklahoma. Stillwater, OK: Oklahoma State University dissertation.Google Scholar
Bailey, Guy & Thomas, Erik. 1998. Some aspects of African-American Vernacular English phonology. In Mufwene, Salikoko, Rickford, John R., Guy, Bailey & John, Baugh (eds.), African-American English: Structure, History, and Use, 85–109. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Baranowski, Maciej. 2013. On the role of social factors in the loss of phonemic distinctions. English Language and Linguistics 17(02). 271–295.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berinsky, Adam J., Huber, Gregory A. & Lenz, Gabriel S.. 2012. Evaluating online labor markets for experimental research: Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk. Political Analysis 20(3). 351–368.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bhattacharyya, Anil. 1943. On a measure of divergence between two statistical populations defined by their probability distributions. Bulletin of the Calcutta Mathematical Society 35. 99–109.Google Scholar
Bigham, Douglas S. 2005. The movement of front vowel allophones before nasals in Southern Illinois White Vernacular English (the PIN PEN merger). Austin, TX: The University of Texas at Austin dissertation.Google Scholar
Boersma, Paul & Weenink, David. 2002. Praat: Doing phonetics by computer. http://www.praat.org/.Google Scholar
Bowie, David. 2000. The effect of geographic mobility of the retention of a local dialect. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania dissertation.Google Scholar
Brown, Vivian R. 1991. Evolution of the merger of /i/ and /ɛ/ before nasals in Tennessee. American Speech 66(3). 303–315.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Coggshall, Elizabeth L. & Becker, Kara. 2009. The vowel phonologies of African American and white New York City residents. Publication of the American Dialect Society 94(1). 101–128.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
De Decker, Paul. 2015. The recorder’s paradox: Balancing high-quality recordings with spontaneous speech in noisy recording environments. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 137. 2304–2304.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
De Decker, Paul & Nycz, Jennifer. 2011. For the record: Which digital media can be used for sociophonetic analysis? University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 17(2). 51–59.Google Scholar
Degen, Judith & Goodman, Noah. 2014. Lost your marbles? The puzzle of dependent measures in experimental pragmatics. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, vol. 36.Google Scholar
Di Paolo, Marianna. 1992. Hypercorrection in response to the apparent merger of (ĉ) and (α) in Utah English. Language & Communication 12(3/4). 267–292.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eberhardt, Maeve. 2009. African American and white vowel systems in Pittsburgh. Publication of the American Dialect Society 94(1). 129–157.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Edwards, Walter F. 1997. The variable persistence of Southern Vernacular Sounds in the speech of inner-city Black Detroiters. In Cynthia, Bernstein, Thomas, Nunnally & Robin, Sabino (eds.), Language Variety in the South Revisited, 76–86. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.Google Scholar
Enochson, Kelly & Culbertson, Jennifer. 2015. Collecting psycholinguistic response time data using Amazon Mechanical Turk. PLOS ONE 10(3).CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Franklin, V.P. 2002. “Location, location, location”: The cultural geography of African Americans: Introduction to a journey. The Journal of African American History 87. 1–11.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Geenberg, Katherine. 2014. The other California: Marginalization and sociolinguistic variation in Trinity County. Palo Alto, California: Stanford University dissertation.Google Scholar
Hall-Lew, Lauren. 2010. Improved representation of variance in measures of vowel merger. Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics 9(1). 1–10.Google Scholar
Harkins, Anthony. 2001. The hillbilly in the living room: Television representations of southern mountaineers in situation comedies, 1952–1971. Appalachian Journal 29(1/2). 98–126.Google Scholar
Hay, Jennifer, Drager, Katie & Thomas, Brynmor. 2013. Using nonsense words to investigate vowel merger. English Language and Linguistics 17(02). 241–269.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hay, Jennifer, Warren, Paul & Drager, Katie. 2006. Factors influencing speech perception in the context of a merger-in-progress. Journal of Phonetics (Modelling Sociophonetic Variation) 34(4). 458–484.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hazen, Kirk. 2005. Mergers in the mountains: West Virginia division and unification. English World-Wide 26(2). 199–221.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hazen, Kirk & Fluharty, Ellen. 2004. Defining Appalachian English. In Margaret, Bender (ed.), Linguistic diversity in the South: Changing codes, practices, and ideology (Southern Anthropological Society Proceedings 37), 50–65. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.Google Scholar
Ito, Kiwako & Campbell-Kibler, Kathryn. 2011. Speaker-adaptation to /I/-/E/ Merger: An Eye-tracking Study. Proceedings of the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS). Hong Kong.Google Scholar
Johnson, Daniel Ezra. 2015. Quantifying overlap with Bhattacharyya’s affinity and other measures. Paper presented at New Ways of Analyzing Variation 44. Toronto, Ontario. https://danielezrajohnson.shinyapps.io/nwav_44/ Google Scholar
Johnson, Susan Allyn. 2006. Industrial voyagers: A case study of Appalachian migration to Akron, Ohio, 1900–1940. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University dissertation.Google Scholar
Kanwal, Jasmeen, Smith, Kenny, Culbertson, Jennifer & Kirby, Simon. 2017. Zipf’s Law of Abbreviation and the Principle of Least Effort: Language users optimise a miniature lexicon for efficient communication. Cognition 165. 45–52.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kim, Chaeyoon, Wyschogrod, Ezra, Reddy, Sravana & Stanford, James. 2016. A large-scale online study of dialect variation in the US Northeast: Crowdsourcing with Amazon Mechanical Turk. Paper presented at New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) 44, Vancouver.Google Scholar
Kirby, Jack Temple. 1983. The southern exodus, 1910–1960: A primer for historians. The Journal of Southern History 49(4). 585–600.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Koops, Christian, Gentry, Elizabeth & Pantos, Andrew. 2008. The effect of perceived speaker age on the perception of PIN and PEN vowels in Houston, Texas. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 14(2). 12.Google Scholar
Labov, William. 1990. The intersection of sex and social class in the course of linguistic change. Language Variation and Change 2(02). 205–254.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Labov, William. 1994. Principles of Linguistic Change. Vol. 1: Internal Factors. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Labov, William. 2011. Principles of Linguistic Change. Vol. 3: Cognitive and Cultural Factors. John Wiley & Sons.Google Scholar
Labov, William, Ash, Sharon & Boberg, Charles. 2006. The atlas of North American English: Phonetics, phonology and sound change. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Labov, William, Cohen, Paul, Robins, Clarence & Lewis, John. 1968. A study of the non-standard English of Negro and Puerto Rican speakers in New York City. Vol. 1: Phonological and grammatical analysis. New York: Columbia University.Google Scholar
Pederson, Lee. 1965. The pronunciation of English in metropolitan Chicago: Vowels and consonants. Publication of the American Dialect Society 44.Google Scholar
Pederson, Lee, McDaniel, Susan & Adams, Carol (eds.). 1986. Linguistic atlas of the Gulf States. 7 vols. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.Google Scholar
Podesva, Robert J., Annette, D’Onofrio, Janneke Van, Hofwegen & Kyung Kim, Seung. 2015. Country ideology and the California Vowel Shift. Language Variation and Change 27(02). 157–186.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tamminga, Meredith. 2017. Matched guise effects can be robust to speech style. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 142(1). EL18–EL23.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Thomas, Brynmor & Hay, Jennifer. 2005. A pleasant malady: The Ellen/Allan merger in New Zealand English. Te Reo 48. 69.Google Scholar
Thomas, Erik. 2004. Rural Southern white accents. In Schneider, Edgar W., Kate, Burridge, Bernd, Kortmann, Rajend, Mesthrie & Clive, Upton (eds.), A handbook of the varieties of English. Volume 1: Phonology, 300–324. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Tillery, Jan & Bailey, Guy. 2004. The urban South: phonology. In Schneider, Edgar W., Kate, Burridge, Bernd, Kortmann, Rajend, Mesthrie & Clive, Upton (eds.), A handbook of varieties of English. Volume 1: Phonology, 325–337. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Tolnay, Stewart E. 2003. The African American “Great Migration” and Beyond. Annual Review of Sociology 29(1). 209–232.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wade, Lacey. 2017. The role of duration in the perception of vowel merger. Laboratory Phonology: Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology 8(1):30. 1–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wang, Shichang, Huang, Chu-Ren, Yao, Yao & Chan, Angel. 2015. Mechanical Turk-based experiment vs laboratory-based Experiment: A case study on the comparison of semantic transparency rating data. Proceedings of the 29th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, 53–62.Google Scholar
Warren, Ron & Fulop, Sean A.. 2014. The merged vowel of PIN and PEN as realized in Bakersfield, California. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 135(4). 2292.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wise, C. M. 1933. Southern American dialect. American Speech 8(2). 37–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wolfram, Walt & Schilling, Natalie. 1998. American English: Dialects and Variation. Wiley.Google Scholar