Variation in perception and production of mid front vowels in the U.S. Southern Vowel Shift

Exploring the relationship between production and perception in the mid front vowels of U.S. English

“…This paper builds on the results presented in a short preliminary paper in the Penn Working Papers in Linguistics (Kendall and Fridland, 2010) and in Kendall and Fridland (2012), a paper that looks more closely at our data on the Southern Vowel Shift. A few sections of this paper, such as the treatment of the experimental and instrumental analysis methods, are discussed in those other papers.…”

“…_ 6 ) T D $ F I G ] [ ( F i g . _ 5 ) T D $ F I G ] 6 Full discussions of the statistical models for the overall perception data are provided in Kendall and Fridland (2012). about dialect saliency that suggest Southern speech differences are most regionally marked to non-linguists Pisoni, 2004, 2007;Niedzielski and Preston, 2003;Preston, 1989Preston, , 1993.…”

Regional differences in the perception of a consonant change in progress

“…As commonly used in the analysis of categorical perception (e.g., Kendall & Fridland, 2012), logistic regressions provide psychometric curves that are defined by 1) their slopes, which indicate how categorical the judgment is (the steeper the curve, the more categorical the judgment) and 2) their medians, which represent the categorical boundary between the /v/ and /f/.…”

“…Janson (1983) found that speakers from different regions and age groups hear Swedish vowels differently. More recently, Kendall & Fridland (2012) studied regional differences in the perception of mid front tense and lax vowels in American English. Their results show that both regional affiliation and individual participation in regional shifts in production play a role in speech perception.…”

“…In previous studies (with the exception of Kendall & Fridland, 2012), regional differences were assumed to be stable and were not described in the context of sound change. In the frame of research on diachronic change, however, it is crucial to determine whether this variation in speech perception plays a role in sound change.…”