Marianna Di Paolo

Phonation differences and the phonetic content of the tense-lax contrast in Utah English

This article presents data bearing on the question of what happens at the phonetic level during a sound change of the type which Labov, Yaeger, and Steiner (1972) labeled an “apparent merger.” Our production data come from three generations of native Utahns who participated in the Intermountain Language Survey (ImLS) and four New Yorkers who served as control subjects. The phonetic subject of our study is the ongoing change in the tense-lax pairs /i-I, e-e, u-υ/ before tautosyllabic dark [†] in Utah English. Previous studies reported that the resultant vowels are usually, but not always, perceived by both transcribers and speakers as lax. Acoustic analysis, self-categorization data, and perception data demonstrate that, after the usual F1/F2 contrast has been lost, contrasts between these and lax vowels may persist in phonation differences and that these phonation differences may be available to hearers.

Double Modals as Single Lexical Items.

In general, there have been two main approaches for ruling out such sequences of modals: the phrase-structure (P-S) rule approach advocated by proponents of the Aux analysis which relies on P-S rules containing only one modal per surface clause (e.g., Chomsky 1957; Akmajian, Steele and Wasow 1979); and the subcategorization approach, proposed by advocates of the Main Verb analysis, which assumes that modals are finite forms and are subcategorized for stem forms (e.g., Baker 1981; Gazdar, Pullum and Sag 1982). One problem that both types of analyses face is that there are large numbers of English speakers, most notably in the South Midland and Southern United States, who regularly use double modals (DMs), as in (2)-(8).2

The Discriminability of Nearly Merged Sounds.

In a near merger, speakers produce two contrasting words differently without being able to reliably discern the contrast in their own speech or in the speech of others. Acoustic measurements typically reveal small differences between the elements of near merged minimal pairs, along several acoustic dimensions. This paper argues that statistical evaluation of the potential distinctiveness of these near merged elements must take simultaneous account of all these dimensions. For that reason, discriminant analysis was used to assess the differences between near merged lil-dl, leI-eli, and IUI-ul! for five Utah speakers. In contrast with independent univariate Analyses of Variance of Fl, F2, fo, and spectral slope, the multivariate discriminant analyses suggest that all three contrasts are preserved by all five speakers. However, homophones like heel and heal were not distinguished by the discriminant analyses. Discriminant analysis is thus a powerful technique for assessing whether a reliable basis exists for the claim that two potentially contrastive items are in fact distinctive.

Dialect differences in vowel production and perception

Earlier work [Faber et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 94, 1865 (1994)] reported differences among American‐English‐speaking listeners from Utah and Connecticut/NY in perception of the HEEL–HILL and POOL–PULL contrasts (pairs that are nearly merged in Utah but distinct in the northeast US), measured by three tasks, labeling, AXB discrimination, and keyword identification. On these tasks, a few CT/NY listeners (those with parents from the southern US) performed differently from the other subjects. Their vowel spaces also were qualitatively different from those of the other listeners, based on acoustic analysis of three readings of the keywords. The CT/southern listeners had more high back crowding and did better on Utah POOL/PULL than the other listeners, while the Utah listeners had more high front crowding and did better on Utah HEEL/HILL. These results accord with the literature reviewed by Bradlow [Cross‐Linguistic Study of Vowel Inventories, Cornell (1993)] relating listeners’ ability to discern small vowel ...

Dialect differences in vowel perception

Analysis based on phonemes assumes that ‘‘u,’’ for example, in whatever context is phonologically the same, and that deviations—sometimes extreme—imposed by following approximants do not affect the category membership of the vowel. Informed by Best’s perceptual assimilation model, which predicts perception of non‐native speech contrasts from their relationship to native segment inventories, this study investigates the contrasting possibility that American English contrasts like pool‐pull and heel‐hill are perceived independently of the contrasts between /u/–/inverted closed omega/ and /i/–/i/ in other contexts. Connecticut and Utah listeners heard productions of both contrasts by speakers from both states; the contrasts are acoustically less different for Utah than for CT speakers. Listener groups completed Keyword identification, forced‐choice labeling, and AXB discrimination tasks. There were systematic listener dialect differences on the keyword and AXB tasks, and both groups did better on the CT than ...