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.
Many people change aspects of their accent after moving to a new region. What kinds of changes are made, and why does it matter? Studies of second dialect acquisition (SDA) indicate that geographically mobile speakers change specific dialect features in ways that ref lect the complex interaction of linguistic, social, and developmental factors in language use. This article reviews these findings from a sociophonetic perspective, paying particular attention to their theoretical implications, the methodological issues associated with studying SDA, and avenues for future research.
This paper examines stylistic variation in the (oh), (o), (aw), and (ay) classes among native speakers of Canadian English living in or just outside either New York City or Washington, DC. Speakers show evidence of change toward US norms for all four vowels, though only (aw) shows consistent style shifting: prevoiceless (aw) is realized with higher nuclei when speakers express ambivalence about or distance from the United States, and lower nuclei when closeness to or positive affect about the United States is being conveyed. Canadians in New York also show topic- and stance-based shift in (oh): (oh)s are higher when expressing positive affect or closeness to New York City and lower when expressing negative affect or distance. These results suggest that mobile speakers continue to exploit the socioindexical links in their native dialect while learning and using new links in their adopted dialect—but only if those links are socially salient.
Vowel mergers are some of the most well-studied sound change phenomena, particularly in varieties of English. But although sociolinguists, dialectologists, and phoneticians are all interested in providing accurate and precise descriptions of an individual speaker's participation in a near-merger (or near-split), the methods for doing so vary widely, especially for researchers analyzing naturalistic corpora. In this paper, we consider four current methodological approaches to representing and assessing vowel distance and overlap: Euclidean distances between averages, Pillai-Bartlett trace (Hay et al., 2006), mixed effects regression modeling (Nycz 2013), and the spectral overlap assessment metric (Wassink 2006). We compare the advantages and disadvantages of each by applying all four methods to three separate data sets. These represent low vowel realizations by speakers from three different studies of English variation: one undergoing merger (COT and CAUGHT in San Francisco, California), one undergoing split, for the same contrast (COT and CAUGHT among Canadians in New York City), and one undergoing split, but for a different contrast (TRAP and BATH among Scots in England). By comparing the similarities and differences between the data sets themselves, as well as the differing analytic motivations for quantifying speaker-specific vowel overlap, we conclude with practical recommendations.
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