Keywords

Low-Back-Merger Shift, cross-regional vowel comparison, homogeneity, heterogeneity

Abstract

The Low-Back-Merger Shift (Becker 2019)

Description:

  • BAT, BET, BIT lower and retract
  • Arguably a chain shift
  • Triggered by BOT-retraction
  • Typically BAT shifts the most
  • BET and especially BIT less shifted

Previous accounts are based on isolated, independent studies.

“Clearly, collecting the same type of data from all sites would be optimal in allowing us the most reliable cross-region assessment.” (Fridland et al. 2017:172)

This study is a direct response to that call.

Methods:

Speakers:

  • Recruited via Amazon Mechanical Turk (“MTurk”; cf. Kim et al 2019)
  • 85 speakers

Procedure:

  • Read 132 sentences and a 300-item wordlist
  • Submitted audio 10 sentences at a time.

Processing:

  • Transcribed by hand
  • Force-aligned with MFA (McAuliffe et al. 2007)
  • Formants extracted with Fast Track (Barreda 2021)
  • Removed unstressed vowels, removed stopwords, removed outliers, normalized, isolated midpoints, removed vowels before liquids and hiatuses, and removed diphthongs—in that order (Stanley 2021)

Original Publication Citation

Joseph A. Stanley, Jessica Shepherd, & Auna Nygaard. “Homogeneity and Heterogeneity in Western American English.” Poster presentation at the American Dialect Society Annual Meeting. Washington, D.C. January 7, 2022.

Document Type

Poster

Publication Date

2022

Publisher

American Dialect Society Annual Meeting

Language

English

College

Humanities

Department

Linguistics

University Standing at Time of Publication

Assistant Professor

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Linguistics Commons

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