Re: USAGE: front vowel tensing [was: English notation]

On Fri, 29 Jun 2001, David Peterson wrote:

>     Yeah, same here.  I think the above (first) statement
> was a pretty rash generalization.  And it really annoys when
> people actually pronounce it [pINk] and [TINk] and [sIN],
> etc.  Reminds me of people who pronounce "feel" and "fill"
> identically.
Now lets not be hasty. Utah English has precisely this near
merger. I say *near* merger, since it has been demonstrated
experimentally that we (Utah English speakers) still distinguish
between /i/ and /I/, even if it doesn't sound like it to the
average East Coaster.

The experiment (in which I was a participant) went like this.
Recordings were made of both Utah English speakers as well as
speaker of English from the East Coast (Connecticut, I believe).
Both groups were asked to read lists of words containing
potential contrasts between /i/ ~ /I/, /e/ ~ /E/, and /u/ ~ /U/.
Such words include: feel/fill, peel/pill, heel/hill; sale/sell,
fail/fell; pool/pull; fool/full.

Recordings of individual words were then put into groups of
threes, with the first two tokens representing the same word and
the last being different, or the last two tokens being the same
and the first being different. Each sequence of three tokens
were from the same speaker. The participants in the experiment
were given the task of listening to the sets of three recordings
and for each set, determining whether the middle token was more
like the first or the last. That is, the participant hears:

        [fil5] ... [fil5] ... [fIl5]

The expected response is that the middle token is more like the
first.

The experiment was conducted both at the University of Utah, and
at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. For the sets of
recordings from speakers of East Coast varieties of English, the
task was trivially easy, and both groups performed equally well.

For the sets of recordings from speakers of Utah English, there
was a clear difference in performance. The Connecticut group
performed dismally, scoring about the same as if they had chosen
at random. This indicates that they clearly heard no distinction
between Utah English pronunciations of words like 'feel/fill'.

By contrast, the Utah English speakers got them right (or wrong)
with greater than random frequency, indicating that the
contrast, while subtle, is still salient for this population.

Personally, I think it's a nifty merger; it parallels nicely the
already established merger between tense and lax vowels before
/r/. In the future, linguists will be able to talk about the
"pre-liquid vowel merger of American English."

Dirk

--
Dirk Elzinga                          dirk.elzinga@m.cc.utah.edu

"The strong craving for a simple formula
has been the undoing of linguists."               - Edward Sapir