Sociolinguistic differences in production of pre-nasal /o/: Evidence from Southeastern Ohio

Abstract

This study investigates the production of /o/ among 14 young adults (ages 18–24) in Athens, Ohio. This vowel is phonetically atypical because it is subject to lexical and phonological conditioning among non-native Athenians living in Athens. To better understand the phonological effects of a following nasal on /o/, the speech of 14 native southeast Ohioans was analyzed acoustically. The data come from sociolinguistic interviews selected from the Southeast Ohio Language Project corpus (Lee et al., 2018). The first two formants of each token of /o/ were extracted (n = 1468), normalized (Lobanov, 1971), and plotted. A mixed effects model was applied to the normalized F2 data to uncover interactions between location (Athens versus non-Athens) and vowel class. Results of the analysis suggest that non-Athenians have a significantly higher F2 value for /o/ than Athenians, and further that non-Athenians distinguish between two /oN/ allophones depending on the lexical item, a distinction that Athenians seem to lack. Furthermore, this fronting effect is more pronounced in words that have a preceding post-alveolar or labiovelar consonant, both of which are likely to result in a higher F2 of the vowel. These findings are an important contribution toward a more thorough understanding of pre-nasal phonological conditioning. This study investigates the production of /o/ among 14 young adults (ages 18–24) in Athens, Ohio. This vowel is phonetically atypical because it is subject to lexical and phonological conditioning among non-native Athenians living in Athens. To better understand the phonological effects of a following nasal on /o/, the speech of 14 native southeast Ohioans was analyzed acoustically. The data come from sociolinguistic interviews selected from the Southeast Ohio Language Project corpus (Lee et al., 2018). The first two formants of each token of /o/ were extracted (n = 1468), normalized (Lobanov, 1971), and plotted. A mixed effects model was applied to the normalized F2 data to uncover interactions between location (Athens versus non-Athens) and vowel class. Results of the analysis suggest that non-Athenians have a significantly higher F2 value for /o/ than Athenians, and further that non-Athenians distinguish between two /oN/ allophones depending on the lexical item, a distinction that Athenians seem to lac...