In examining the history of /ay/-raising before voiceless consonants in Philadelphia, Josef Fruehwald (2016) concludes that either categorical phonological conditioning was present from the very onset of this phonetic change, or the period of purely phonetic conditioning was too brief to be identified. This is based on the observation that raising is phonological in the Philadelphia data: it occurs before voiced flaps that are underlyingly voiceless (as in writing), but not before underlyingly voiced flaps (as in riding). In this response, we provide the first acoustic documentation of an English variety that shows an incipient phase of /ay/-raising where the conditioning environment is purely phonetic.*
This article addresses incipient/aI/-raising in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Acoustic analysis of word list data from 27 participants targets both typical items (e.g., write, writing) and monomorphemic trochaic words often overlooked in previous research (e.g., Nike, bison, cyber, tiger). It reports four major/aI/production patterns in the Fort Wayne data, which range on a continuum from no/aI/-raising to phonological raising of/aI/(i.e., raising before t-flaps, a pattern of Canadian raising referred to as Dialect A). In the middle of the continuum is found the elusive Dialect B, a pattern of Canadian raising first documented by Martin Joos in 1942 in which raising occurs in write but not before t-flaps. The authors find that speakers of this type of raising tend not to raise in any trochaic words. In fact, raising in monomorphemic trochaic words, such as Nike or bison, is exceedingly rare in the Fort Wayne data. In tandem with the variation observed within Fort Wayne, the fact that raising has not yet extended into monomorphemic trochaic words further suggests that raising is incipient in this variety. The authors propose that Dialect B is not a separate dialect at all but an incipient variety of Dialect A.
The two-way voicing contrast in American English stops—particularly in initial position—is often described as a long-lag (e.g., long positive VOT for /p/) versus short-lag (e.g., short positive VOT for /b/) distinction, with less frequent instances of lead voicing (e.g., negative VOT for /b/) attributed to individual variation. Systematic within-category gender and region differences have been reported, however, with more closure voicing found for male than for female speakers (Ryalls, Zipprer, and Baldauff, 1997), and more fully voiced closures for /b/ in female speakers from North Carolina than those from Wisconsin (Jacewicz, Fox, and Lyle, 2009). With this in mind, we investigate the interaction of gender and region in the prevoicing of word-initial voiced stops by comparing the VOTs of male and female speakers from Indiana and Mississippi. Participants were recorded reading three repetitions of a pseudo-randomized list of words including bot, dot, and got. Regional—but no gender—differences were found: speakers from Mississippi produced stops with negative VOT more often (~35% of the time) than speakers from Indiana (~15%), suggesting that southern varieties of English are indeed more heavily prevoiced than other varieties of English.
The phenomenon often referred to as Canadian Raising, wherein speakers raise the diphthongs /aɪ/ and /aʊ/ to [ʌɪ] and [ʌʊ], respectively, when preceding voiceless sounds, is attested not only in Canada but also in places in the Northern periphery of the U.S. (e.g., Ann Arbor and the Upper Peninsula, in Michigan). Raising has also been documented in locations distant from the border, such as Philadelphia. The current study examines the spread of raising farther south from Michigan into northeast Indiana, specifically Fort Wayne. Acoustic analysis of preliminary data from Fort Wayne area speakers was conducted to determine whether raising indeed occurs and to explore the effect of contextual factors such as speaker sex, age, and prosodic structure. The results confirm that while this raising does in fact happen around Fort Wayne, there is an age effect: younger speakers (<25 yr) show raising across the board in the expected environments but older speakers (>60 yr) do not. This suggests that vowel raising is a relatively new characteristic of Fort Wayne English.
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