scholarly journals Food for /θɔt/ or /θɑt/?

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 48-56
Author(s):  
Rosa Balliro
Keyword(s):  
Low Back ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
Back Vowel

The English low back vowel merger, where words like caught and cot are pronounced identically, is a well-studied phenomenon. Generally, these studies focus on mergers within given regions, comparing vowels of non-mobile individuals. My research differs in exploring the effects of relocation. I examine pronunciation differences of vowels in differently gendered twins from England who moved to Canada as children. Despite growing up in similar environments, their vowel patterns differ: there is some evidence of merger in the female’s but not the male’s vowels. This suggests that mobility and exposure to a new dialect may affect pronunciation changes but are not the sole factors. 

New contrast acquisition: methodological issues and theoretical implications

2013 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 325-357 ◽  
Author(s):  
JENNIFER NYCZ
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Word List ◽  
Low Back ◽  
City Region ◽  
Canadian English ◽  
Methodological Issues ◽  
Back Vowel ◽  
Word Classes ◽  
Vowel Contrast

This article presents data on the acquisition of the low back vowel contrast by native speakers of Canadian English who have moved as adults to the New York City region, examining how these speakers who natively possess a single low back vowel category have acquired the low back vowel distinction of the new ambient dialect. The speakers show remarkable first dialect stability with respect to their low back vowel system, even after many years of new dialect exposure: in minimal pair contexts, nearly all of the speakers continue to produce and perceive a single vowel category. However, in word list and conversational contexts, the majority of speakers exhibit a small but significant phonetic difference between words like cot and caught, reflecting the separation of these word classes in the new dialect to which they are exposed; moreover, the realization of these words shows frequency effects consistent with a lexically gradual divergence of the two vowels. These findings are discussed in terms of their implications for theories of phonological representation and change, as well as their methodological implications for the study of mergers- and splits-in-progress.

Low-back vowel merger in Minnesotan English.

2009 ◽  
Vol 126 (4) ◽  
pp. 2162 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kaitlyn Arctander ◽  
Hannah Kinney ◽  
Christina M. Esposito
Keyword(s):  
Low Back ◽  
Back Vowel

scholarly journals Assessing merged status with Pillai scores based on dynamic formant contours

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 203
Author(s):  
Jonathan Jibson
Keyword(s):  
Basic Research ◽  
The Other ◽  
Alternative Methods ◽  
Spectral Information ◽  
Low Back ◽  
Identification Task ◽  
Vowel Identification ◽  
Back Vowel ◽  
The One ◽  
Better Than

When Pillai scores are used to study vowel mergers, formants are typically sampled from the midpoint. This study compares alternative methods for calculating Pillai scores: methods that incorporate dynamic spectral information. Eighteen speakers produced 20 tokens of Hodd and hawed. Formants were sampled at 20–35–50–65–80% duration. Seven Pillai scores were calculated, each based on a different subset of those samples with temporal pooling: (i) onsets, (ii) heads, (iii) midpoints, (iv) onsets + offsets, (v) heads + tails, (vi) onsets + midpoints + offsets, and (vii) all five. Subjects also completed a vowel identification task, and the rate of identifying one low-back vowel as the other was calculated. The results of the identification task were regressed on each Pillai score separately to identify the one with the highest correlation, through model selection. Dynamic formant contours performed better than static formant values, with midpoint sampling performing worst of all. Directions are discussed for basic research on Pillai scores in phonetics.

Back Vowel Dynamics and Distinctions in Southern American English

2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 389-418
Author(s):  
Joseph A. Stanley ◽  
Margaret E. L. Renwick ◽  
Katherine Ireland Kuiper ◽  
Rachel M. Olsen
Keyword(s):  
American English ◽  
The United States ◽  
Geographic Region ◽  
Mixed Effects ◽  
Mixed Effects Models ◽  
Low Back ◽  
Vowel Space ◽  
Southern American English ◽  
Back Vowel ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Southern American English is spoken in a large geographic region in the United States. Its characteristics include back-vowel fronting (e.g., in goose, foot, and goat), which has been ongoing since the mid-nineteenth century; meanwhile, the low back vowels (in lot and thought) have recently merged in some areas. We investigate these five vowels in the Digital Archive of Southern Speech, a legacy corpus of linguistic interviews with sixty-four speakers born 1886-1956. We extracted 89,367 vowel tokens and used generalized additive mixed-effects models to test for socially-driven changes to both their relative phonetic placements and the shapes of their formant trajectories. Our results reinforce previous descriptions of Southern vowels while contributing additional phonetic detail about their trajectories. Goose-fronting is a change in progress, with greatest fronting after coronal consonants. Goat is quite dynamic; it lowers and fronts in apparent time. Generally, women have more fronted realizations than men. Foot is largely monophthongal, and stable across time. Lot and thought are distinct and unmerged, occupying different regions of the vowel space. While their relative positions change across generations, all five vowels show a remarkable consistency in formant trajectory shapes across time. This study’s results reveal social and phonetic details about the back vowels of Southerners born in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: goose-fronting was well underway, goat-fronting was beginning, but foot remained backed, and the low back vowels were unmerged.

Acoustic Characteristics of Pre- and Post-vocalic /l/: Patterns from One Southern White Vernacular English

2021 ◽  
pp. 002383092110373
Author(s):  
Hyunju Chung
Keyword(s):  
Descriptive Analysis ◽  
Young Female ◽  
Low Back ◽  
Front Vowel ◽  
Male Adult ◽  
Acoustic Characteristics ◽  
Vowel Context ◽  
Vernacular English ◽  
Word Position ◽  
Back Vowel

This study examined acoustic characteristics of the phoneme /l/ produced by young female and male adult speakers of Southern White Vernacular English (SWVE) from Louisiana. F1, F2, and F2-F1 values extracted at the /l/ midpoint were analyzed by word position (pre- vs. post-vocalic) and vowel contexts (/i, ɪ/ vs. /ɔ, a/). Descriptive analysis showed that SWVE /l/ exhibited characteristics of the dark /l/ variant. The formant patterns of /l/, however, differed significantly by word position and vowel context, with pre-vocalic /l/ showing significantly higher F2-F1 values than post-vocalic /l/, and /l/ in the high front vowel context showing significantly higher F2-F1 values than those in the low back vowel context. Individual variation in the effects of word position and vowel contexts on /l/ pattern was also observed. Overall, the findings of the current study showed a gradient nature of SWVE /l/ variants whose F2-F1 patterns generally fell into the range of the dark /l/ variant, while varying by word position and vowel context.

Patterns of the Mainstream Sound Change in a Liminal Region: Low Back Merger in Washington DC

2018 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 267-292 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sinae Lee
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Sound Change ◽  
European American ◽  
Washington Dc ◽  
Low Back ◽  
Back Vowel ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The City ◽  
Degree Of Overlap

This study investigates the low back vowel merger (lot-thought merger) of African American and European American speakers in Washington DC. The study aims to follow up with the previous investigation by Labov et al. (2006) on low back merger in DC, and investigate whether African American speakers in DC are participating in the merger, one of the majority-led sound changes. The study also examines the difference in low back vowel production between African Americans from a particular quadrant of the city, namely, Southeast (SE), and those from elsewhere in DC. Data are taken from forty sociolinguistic interviews with natives of DC. The vowels were analyzed acoustically, taking F1 and F2 measurements at three different points of a vowel. Both the F1 and the F2 dimensions of the low back vowels and the degree of overlap were examined. The degree of overlap was measured by calculating the Pillai score for each speaker, with duration and following environment taken into account. Results indicate that DC is conservatively participating in the merger, with European American speakers exhibiting higher degrees of overlap than African American speakers. An age effect is also observed, but only among African American speakers who are not from SE. The study further argues that the participation in the mainstream sound change by some African Americans can also be analyzed as convergence to the local white norm, and that this convergence is more likely to be carried out by African American speakers who are not from SE, a section of the city in which the contact between African American speakers and European American speakers is minimal.

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

2017 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 245-271 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tyler Kendall ◽  
Valerie Fridland
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Statistical Analysis ◽  
Acoustic Analysis ◽  
The United States ◽  
Low Back ◽  
Front Vowel ◽  
Identification Task ◽  
Vowel Identification ◽  
Regional Dialects ◽  
Back Vowel

AbstractThe 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/.

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