Prelateral vowel change in Australian English pool-pull trajectories

Abstract

Australian English (AusE) pre-/l/ /ʉ:/ is retracted when coarticulated with coda /l/, leading to vowel change through acoustic contrast reduction between /ʉ:-ʊ/ (pool-pull). Younger speakers show smaller contrast in /ʉ:l- ʊl/ targets than older speakers. As vowel trajectories are less well understood, we tested changes in the F2 trajectory. 200 tokens of /ʉ:, ʊ/ in the /hVd, pVl/ contexts (who’d-hood, pool-pull), produced by eight younger (ages = 20–29) and nine older (ages = 54–80) female AusE speakers, were extracted from the audio corpus AusTalk. Formant trajectories in pre-/d/ vowels and /Vl/ rimes were extracted automatically, corrected manually, and time-normalized (0–1). F2 trajectory was fitted with a Generalized Additive Mixed Model using fixed factors Vowel, Coda, and Age (treatment-coded, comparing /ʉ:/ to /ʊ/, /l/ to /d/, younger to older) with Speaker as random intercept with smooths for Vowel and Coda. Both age groups maintained significant vowel contrast in the pre-/d/ context in the entire vowel trajectory. In the /l/-context, older speakers showed a significant F2 difference throughout the rime trajectory, while younger speakers did not. Durational differences may be maintained, as duration contrast was not analysed due to time normalization. Our findings are consistent with an AusE pool-pull merger.