At this week’s MCQLL meeting, Irene Smith will be presenting Perception of PIN-PEN merger in Southern and non-Southern American-English listeners.

When:
Wednesday, February 26, 10:00–11:00 (Montréal time, UTC-5)
Where:
MCQLL meetings this semester are in hybrid format. We will meet in-person in room 117 of the McGill Linguistics Department, 1085 Dr-Penfield. If you’d like to attend virtually, the Zoom link is here.

All are welcome to attend.

  • Speaker:
    Irene Smith
    Title:
    Perception of PIN-PEN merger in Southern and non-Southern American-English listeners.
    Abstract:

    Merged production of /ɪ/ and /ɛ/ before nasal consonants is well documented in Southern US English. Perception studies of this merger are more limited (cf. Austen 2020). One possible source of pre-nasal merger is anticipatory vowel nasalization. A 2AFC perception task asked US listeners from inside or outside the South, to categorize stimuli on continua from bid to bed and bin to Ben. To test the effects of consonant and vowel nasality separately, we cross-spliced stimuli in a 2 by 2 design. We ask (1) whether Southern speakers are merged in perception, as is generally assumed, and (2) whether it is vowel nasality, consonant nasality, or both that gives rise to merger in perception. We fit a Bayesian mixed-effects logistic regression model on probability of /ɛ/ responses with fixed slopes of continuum step, vowel nasality, coda nasality, subject region, and all interactions, by-speaker random intercepts, and by-speaker random slopes of continuum step, vowel nasality, coda nasality, and all interactions We found that Southern listeners had a flatter categorization function with lower accuracy at the continuum ends than non-Southern listeners whenever a nasal coda was present, regardless of vowel nasality, confirming that (1) Southern speakers are to some degree, merged in perception, and (2) that the presence of the nasal coda, and not vowel nasality, conditions merger in perception.