An acoustic study of the Mary-merry-marry vowels in the Mid-Atlantic United States

Abstract

This paper examines the acoustic properties of a subset of American English vowels before /r/--specifically, the mid and low front vowels in the MARY, MERRY, and MARRY classes. While the dialectal variation associated with the MARY, MERRY, and MARRY classes is well known in the sociolinguistics literature, the precise phonetic nature of these vowels has not been well studied. Many scholars [e.g., Labov et al. (2006)] transcribe the vowels as /eɪ/, /ɛ/, and /æ/, respectively, but these labels are largely impressionistic. The present study samples five speakers from the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States who maintain a three-way distinction between MARY, MERRY, and MARRY. The speakers' productions of MARY, MERRY, and MARRY vowels in both sentence and word list tasks were analyzed in Praat, and the resultant formant values were submitted to one-way ANOVAs, followed by pairwise comparisons (Tukey's HSD). The primary finding of this study is that the MARY vowel is acoustically closest to a tense (raised and fronted) variant of /æ/, similar to that which appears before nasals in many American English dialects. Contrary to previous descriptions, the MARY vowel shows little overlap with /eɪ/, suggesting that the conventional transcription should be revised.