At this week’s MCQLL meeting, Irene Smith will present “Perception of vowel contrasts in the presence of an allophonic merger”

We will be meeting this Wednesday, October 9, at noon. Meetings are held in person in room 117 of the McGill Linguistics department and on zoom at https://mcgill.zoom.us/j/82524506850.


Abstract: The PIN-PEN merger is a feature of Southern US and African American English, in which the vowels in the words pin and pen are pronounced the same, but are pronounced distinctly in pre-oral contexts, like bid and bed. The existence of full merger in production is well supported by acoustic studies, but it is less clear whether speakers with the merger are merged in perception as well, i.e., whether they can hear the difference between pin and pen words when they are acoustically distinct. This talk will outline the early stages of an experiment targeting the PIN-PEN merger in perception across both merged and non-merged North American populations.