Abstract
The production of the lax vowel /æ/ is widely studied as a sociolinguistic variable in American English, as several dialects differ in the allophonic distribution of lax and tense variants of the vowel. Using a forced-choice well-formedness judgment task, this paper tests whether the /æ/ used by Northern Cities Shift (NCS) speakers, which is described as a raised and tensed [ɛə] in all environments, is still represented as a lax vowel in speakers’ grammars. Participants who were native speakers of California English, which only tenses preceding nasals, and NCS English, which tenses everywhere, were asked to choose which of a pair of nonce words, constructed to include a lax-only environment /Vsk, Vsp/, as in gasp, risk, sounds more like a possible English word. California English speakers significantly prefer frames containing lax vowels, including [æ], over those containing tense vowels. NCS speakers respond in the same way: they favor [ɛə] in trials like [bɛəsp] vs. [bisp] just as California English speakers favor [æ] in [bæsp] vs. [bisp]. This suggests they keep the vowel in the phonologically active class usually considered to be lax vowels, providing evidence that speakers generalize features based on lexical distributions rather than phonetic properties.
Highlights
The production of the lax vowel /æ/ is widely studied as a sociolinguistic variable in American English, as several dialects differ in the allophonic distribution of the vowel
We are addressing several issues: whether there is a phonotactic restriction on tense vowels appearing in /Vsk,Vsp/ coda, whether /æ/ is in the same phonological class as other lax vowels, and whether the Northern Cities Shift group differs from the Californian group
I first compare the results to chance to look for evidence of a phonotactic restriction on tense vowels
Summary
The production of the lax vowel /æ/ is widely studied as a sociolinguistic variable in American English, as several dialects differ in the allophonic distribution of the vowel. I ask whether the /æ/ used by Northern Cities Shift speakers, which is described as a raised and tensed [ɛə] in all environments, is still represented as a lax vowel in speakers’ grammars. Many variables are described in terms of feature differences between phonetic variants, yet their phonological representations are unknown. The variation between tense and lax /æ/ is interesting because the tense/lax vowel classes are targeted by phonological patterns in English. Tense and lax vowels are subject to morphophonological rules and differ in phonotactic distribution. The central question of this paper is determining whether the tense /æ/ used by Northern Cities Shift speakers belongs to the phonological class of tense or lax vowels
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