Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rdxmf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T22:06:47.292Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

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
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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

REFERENCES

Baayen, Harald. (2008). Analyzing linguistic data: A practical introduction to statistics using R. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Becker, Kara, Aden, Anna, Best, Katelyn, & Jacobson, Haley. (2016). Variation in West Coast English: The case of Oregon. In Fridland, V., Kendall, T., Evans, B., & Wassink, A. B. (eds.), Speech in the Western states. Vol. 1. The coastal states. Durham: Duke University Press. 107–134.Google Scholar
Benson, Erica, Fox, Michael, & Balkman, Jared. (2011). The bag that Scott bought: The low vowels in Northwest Wisconsin. American Speech 86(3):271–311.Google Scholar
Bigham, Doug. (2010). Correlation of the low-back vowel merger and trap-retraction. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 15(2):21–31.Google Scholar
Boberg, Charles. (2005). The Canadian shift in Montreal. Language Variation and Change 17:133–154.Google Scholar
Boersma, Paul, & Weenink, David. (2012). Praat: Doing phonetics by computer. Version 5.3.05. Available at: http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/.Google Scholar
Clopper, Cynthia, Pisoni, David, & de Jong, Keith. (2005). Acoustic characteristics of the vowel systems of six regional varieties of American English. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 118:1661–1676.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Di Paolo, Marianna. (1992). Hypercorrection in response to the apparent merger of (oh) and (a) in Utah English. Language and Communication 12:267–292.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dinkin, Aaron. (2011). Weakening resistance: Progress toward the low back merger in New York State. Language Variation and Change 23:315–345.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dodsworth, Robin, & Mary, Kohn. (2012). The urban rejection of the vernacular: The SVS undone. Language Variation and Change 24.2:221–245.Google Scholar
Doernberger, Jeremy, & Cerny, Jacob. (2008). The low back merger in Miami. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 14(2):11–15.Google Scholar
D'Onofrio, Annette, Eckert, Penelope, Podesva, Robert J., Pratt, Teresa, & Van Hofwegen, Janneke. (2016). The low vowels in California's Central Valley. In Fridland, V., Kendall, T., Evans, B., & Wassink, A. B. (eds.), Speech in the Western states. Vol. 1. The coastal states. Durham: Duke University Press. 11–32.Google Scholar
Eckert, Penelope. (2004). Vowel shifts in Northern California and the Detroit suburbs: Northern California Vowels. Available at: http://www.stanford.edu/~eckert/vowels.html. Accessed March 5, 2017.Google Scholar
Evans, Bronwen, & Iverson, Paul. (2007). Plasticity in vowel perception and production: A study of accent change in young adults. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 121:3814–3826.Google Scholar
Farrington, Charlie, Kendall, Tyler, & Fridland, Valerie. (2015). Inherent spectral change in the Southern Vowel Shift. Presentation at the NorthWest Phonetics and Phonology Conference (NoWPhon) 1, Eugene, Oregon, June 4.Google Scholar
Fox, Robert A., & Jacewicz, Ewa. (2011). Perceptual sensitivity to dialectal and generational variations in vowels. Interspeech 2011: Proceedings of the 12th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association. Red Hook, NY: Curran Associates. 2921–2924.Google Scholar
Fridland, Valerie. (2012). Rebel vowels: Southern vowel shift and the N/S speech divide. Language and Linguistic Compass 6(3):183–192.Google Scholar
Fridland, Valerie. (2015). The spread of the cot/caught merger in the speech of Memphians: An ethnolinguistic marker? In Picone, M. D. & Evans, C. (eds.), Language variety in the South: Historical and contemporary perspectives. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. 551–564.Google Scholar
Fridland, Valerie, & Kendall, Tyler. (2012). Exploring the relationship between production and perception in the mid front vowels of U.S. English. Lingua 122(7):779–793.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fridland, Valerie, & Kendall, Tyler. (2015). Within-region diversity in the southern vowel shift: Production and perception. In The Scottish Consortium for ICPhS 2015 (ed.), Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. Glasgow: University of Glasgow. Paper no. 500.Google Scholar
Fridland, Valerie, & Kendall, Tyler. (in press). Speech in the Silver State. In Fridland, V., Evans, B., Wassink, A. B., & Kendall, T. (eds.), Speech in the Western states. Vol. 2. The mountain West. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Fridland, Valerie, Kendall, Tyler, & Farrington, Charlie. (2014). Durational and spectral differences in American English vowels: Dialect variation within and across regions. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 136(1):341–349.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gordon, Matthew J. (2001). Small-town values and big-city vowels: A study of the Northern Cities Shift in Michigan. Vol. 84. Publication of the American Dialect Society. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Gordon, Matthew J. (2005). The Midwest and West. In Schneider, E. (ed.), Handbook of varieties of English: The Americas and Caribbean. Vol. 1. Phonology. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 338–350.Google Scholar
Gordon, Matthew J. (2013). Investigating chain shifts and mergers. In Chambers, J. K. & Schilling, N. (eds.), The handbook of language variation and change. 2nd ed. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. 203–219.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hall-Lew, Lauren. (2010a). Ethnicity and sociolinguistic variation in San Francisco. Language and Linguistics Compass 4:458–472.Google Scholar
Hall-Lew, Lauren. (2010b). Improved representation of variance in measures of vowel merger. Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics 9:060002.Google Scholar
Hall-Lew, Lauren. (2013). “Flip-flop” and mergers-in-progress. English Language and Linguistics 17:359–390.Google Scholar
Hay, Jennifer, Warren, Paul, & Drager, Katie. (2006). Factors influencing speech perception in the context of a merger-in-progress. Journal of Phonetics 34:458–484.Google Scholar
Herold, Ruth. (1990). Mechanisms of merger: The implementation and distribution of the low back merger in eastern Pennsylvania. PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.Google Scholar
Jacewicz, Ewa, Fox, Robert A., & Salmons, Joseph. (2011). Cross-generational vowel change in American English. Language Variation and Change 23:45–86.Google Scholar
Kendall, Tyler. (2013). Speech rate, pause, and sociolinguistic variation: Studies in corpus sociophonetics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kendall, Tyler, & Fridland, Valerie. (2012). Variation in perception and production of mid front vowels in the U.S. Southern Vowel Shift. Journal of Phonetics 40:289–306.Google Scholar
Kendall, Tyler, & Fridland, Valerie. (2016). Mapping the perception of linguistic form: Dialectometry with perception data. In Côté, M.-H., Knooihuizen, R, & Nerbonne, J. (eds.), The future of dialects. Berlin: Language Science Press. 173–194.Google Scholar
Kendall, Tyler, & Thomas, Erik. (2009). Vowels: Vowel manipulation, normalization, and plotting in R. R package, version 1.2-1. Available at: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/vowels/index.html. Accessed March 5, 2017.Google Scholar
Kurath, Hans. (1939). Handbook of the linguistic geography of New England. Providence: Brown University.Google Scholar
Kuznetsova, Alexandra, Brockhoff, Per B., & Christensen, Rune H. B. (2014). lmerTest: Tests in linear mixed effects models. R package version 2.0-20. Available at: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/lmerTest/index.html. Accessed February 2, 2015.Google Scholar
Labov, William. (1994). Principles of linguistic change: Internal factors. Malden: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Labov, William. 2001. Principles of linguistic change: Social factors. Malden: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Labov, William, & Baranowski, Maciej. (2006). 50 msec. Language Variation and Change 18:1–18.Google Scholar
Labov, William, Ash, Sharon, & Boberg, Charles. (2006). The Atlas of North American English. Berlin: Mouton.Google Scholar
Labov, William, Rosenfelder, Ingrid, & Fruehwald, Josef. (2013). One hundred years of sound change in Philadelphia: Linear incrementation, reversal, and reanalysis. Language 89:30–65.Google Scholar
Labov, William, Yaeger, Malcah, & Steiner, Richard. (1972). A quantitative study of sound change in progress. Philadelphia: U.S. Regional Survey.Google Scholar
Liljencrants, Johan, & Lindblom, Björn. (1972). Numerical simulation of vowel quality systems: The role of perceptual contrast. Language 48:839–862.Google Scholar
Lindblom, Björn. (1986). Phonetic universals in vowel systems. In Ohala, J. J. & Jaeger, J. J. (eds.), Experimental phonology. Orlando: Academic Press. 13–44.Google Scholar
Lobanov, Boris. (1971). Classification of Russian vowels spoken by different listeners. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 49:606–608.Google Scholar
Martinet, André. (1955). Economie des changements phonétiques . Berne: Francke.Google Scholar
Maye, Jessica, Aslin, Richard N., & Tanenhaus, Michael K. (2008). The weckud wetch of the wast: Lexical adaptation to a novel accent. Cognitive Science 32:543–562.Google Scholar
McCarthy, Corrine. (2010). The Northern Cities Shift in real time: Evidence from Chicago. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 15(2):101–110.Google Scholar
Moonwomon, Birch. (1987). Truly awesome: (ɔ) in California English. In Denning, K. M., Inkelas, S., McNair-Knox, F., & Rickford, J. (eds.), Variation in language: NWAV-XV at Stanford (Proceedings of the fifteenth annual New Ways of Analyzing Variation conference). Palo Alto: Dept. of Linguistics, Stanford University. 325–336.Google Scholar
Moonwomon, Birch. (1991). Sound change in San Francisco English. PhD dissertation, University of California.Google Scholar
Nycz, Jennifer, & Hall-Lew, Lauren. (2014). Best practices in measuring vowel merger. Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics 20:060008.Google Scholar
Pinget, Anne-France. (2015). The actuation of sound change. PhD dissertation. Utrecht University.Google Scholar
R Development Core Team. (2010). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. Available at: http://www.R-project.org/.Google Scholar
Strelluf, Christopher. (2014). “We have such a normal, non-accented voice”: A sociophonetic study of English in Kansas City. PhD dissertation, University of Missouri.Google Scholar
Sumner, Meghan, & Samuel, Arthur. (2009). The effect of experience on the perception and representation of dialect variants. Journal of Memory and Language 60:487–501.Google Scholar
Terrell, Tracy. (1976). Some theoretical considerations on the merger of the low vowel phonemes in American English. Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 2:350–359.Google Scholar
Thomas, Erik R. (2001). An acoustic analysis of vowel variation in New World English. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Wassink, Alicia B. (2015). Sociolinguistic patterns in Seattle English. Language Variation and Change 27:1–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wassink, Alicia B. (2016). The vowels of Washington State. In Fridland, V., Kendall, T., Evans, B., and Wassink, A. B. (eds.), Speech in the Western states. Vol. 1. The coastal states. Durham: Duke University Press. 77–105.Google Scholar
Weatherholtz, Kodi. (2015). Perceptual learning of systemic cross-category vowel variation. PhD dissertation, The Ohio State University.Google Scholar