How salient is thenurse~squaremerger?

Abstract

This article reports the results of an experimental investigation into listeners' evaluative reactions towards thenurse~squaremerger in the north-west of England, in an attempt to shed light on its salience. Although speakers across England's north-west have anurse~squaremerger, its realisation differs: in Liverpool, speakers typically merge to a mid front [ɛː], while speakers from St Helens, just 20km further east, merge to a mid central [ɜː]. To test listeners' responses to each variant, we presented two groups of listeners from each of these localities with read sentence data from a single speaker. The speaker was from the north-west of England and had a centralisednurse~squarevowel in his native accent (representing the St Helens model). To achieve a matched-guise, the originalnurse~squarevowels were acoustically manipulated to give the impression of fronting (representing the Liverpool model). Listeners from Liverpool and St Helens were asked to react to guises along the status dimension, and their reaction was measured in real-time using bespoke audience response software administered via the web. The novelty in this approach is that it can be used not only to show that listeners do indeed react to the guises, but also to examine preciselywhenthis reaction takes place. Our results show that (a) overall, speakers with anurse~squaremerger are not rated highly on the status dimension, regardless of whether they have a merger to a front or central vowel; (b) listeners' real-time reactions can be correlated with instances ofnurseandsquare; and (c) listeners' responses tonursecan be different from responses tosquare.We discuss these results in relation to the salience of this merger in particular and to salience in general. We suggest that the salience ofnurseandsquareis related to the local social context and the micro-linguistic context in which they appear.