Variation in perception and production of mid front vowels in the U.S. Southern Vowel Shift

Abstract

Looking at speech perception from a sociolinguistic perspective, the paper first explores how speakers from three different regions in the U.S. perform on a vowel identification task for a continuum between /e/ and /ɛ/. Following the general analysis of cross-regional perception, we turn our focus to a subsample of Southern participants who also provided speech data, investigating the nature of the link between their speech production and perception for these vowels. In particular, we are interested in the extent to which participation in a series of shifts affecting the Southern speech region in production (the Southern Vowel Shift or SVS) affects perception in that region. The data includes a set of seven siblings and we also examine whether sibling status affects perceptual variability. Our results suggest that region does play a significant role in mediating perception, particularly in the South, and that SVS participation in production is related to differences in perception within that region, suggesting that both individual and community based norms are crucial in speech processing. Finally, identifying a large amount of familial variability in both perception and production, we find that siblinghood does not seem to play a greater role in speech perception similarity than shift participation.