“…The LBMS occurs throughout California (Cardoso, Hall-Lew, Kementchedjhieva, & Purse, 2016;D'Onofrio, Eckert, Podesva, Pratt, & Van Hofwegen, 2016;D'Onofrio, Pratt, & Van Hofwegen, 2019;Fridland & Kendall, 2019), in western states like Washington (Swan, 2019;Wassink, 2016), Oregon (Fridland & Kendall, 2019;McLarty, Kendall, & Farrington, 2016), and Nevada (Fridland & Kendall, 2017. The pattern (or some of its components) is also attested increasingly eastward in parts of Montana (Bar-El, Felton Rosulek, & Sprowls, 2017), Utah (Bowie, 2017), New Mexico (Brumbaugh & Koops, 2017), Colorado (Holland & Brandenburg, 2017), Kansas (Kohn & Stithem, 2015;Villarreal & Kohn, 2021), Missouri (Strelluf, 2019), Illinois (Bigham, 2010), and Ohio (Durian, 2012;Durian, Dodsworth, & Schumacher, 2009), as well as more remotely in both Alaska (Bowie, 2020) and Hawaii (Kirtley, Grama, Drager, & Simpson, 2016). We argue for the unison of LBMS patterns across Canada and the western United States for two reasons: (1) the settlement history of these regions resulted in the same low vowel configuration; and (2) the LBMS is the structural consequence of this configuration.…”