The role of duration in the perception of vowel merger

Abstract

Speakers with vowel categories that are considered merged by traditional measures (e.g., F1 and F2 measurements at a single time point) may contrast vowel classes in dimensions beyond vowel quality, such as duration. Durational differences among vowel classes have been observed to persist even in cases of spectral overlap (e.g., Fridland et al., 2014; Labov & Baranowski, 2006), suggesting that duration may serve as a contrastive cue among spectrally-merged or near-merged vowel classes. This paper examines the role of duration in perception in two communities: Youngstown, OH, which exhibits multiple patterns of merger and distinction among POOL-, PULL-, and POLE-CLASS words, and Burlington, VT, whose residents are largely unmerged. This paper presents the results of a forced-choice identification task consisting of lexical stimuli with synthetically manipulated vowel-liquid durations, analyzed in light of participants’ production data. Results indicate that duration influences vowel categorization and is utilized more extensively when spectral cues are diminished or unavailable.

Keywords

• vowel merger
• sociophonetics
• perception
• production
• duration