Phon&Phon 26 Apr 2016: M Baranowski on the NORTH-FORCE merger in Manchester

The Department of Contemporary English Language (DoCELu) is happy to announce a Phon&Phon meeting:
 

Maciej Baranowski (Manchester University)

Part of town as an independent factor: the NORTH-FORCE merger in Manchester English

Tuesday, 26 Apr 2016, 18:30, Room 109A

Abstract

This study reports on patterns of variation and change in the status of the phonemic contrast between the NORTH and FORCE vowels in Manchester. It is based on a sample of 122 informants, stratified by age, gender, socio-economic status, ethnicity, and part of town.

The informants’ complete vowel systems are measured in terms of F1 and F2 in Praat (Boersma & Weenink 2012). For 25 speakers, the point of measurement is selected by hand, following Labov, Ash, and Boberg (2006). The speech of 97 speakers is measured automatically, using the Forced Alignment and Vowel Extraction suite (Rosenfelder et al. 2011). The paper explores variation in the acoustic position of each of the phonemes (F1 and F2) and the phonetic distance between them, measured as Cartesian distance (based on means and medians) and Pillai scores (Nycz & Hall-Lew 2014). In addition, it reports on the results of minimal pair tests conducted for 112 speakers, testing their perception and production of the phonemic contrast.

The minimal pair test results and the acoustic distance measures are subjected to a series of multiple linear regressions, with factors such as age, gender, socio-economic status, ethnicity, part of town, and style entered as independent variables. In addition, the F1 measurements of the two vowels are subjected to mixed-effects modelling, with speaker and word entered as random effects.

The results suggest that while the two phonemes are now largely merged for the middle classes, so that words in pairs such as four-for, hoarse-horse, wore-war sound identical, there is a significant distinction for working class speakers, both in perception and production. Interestingly, the models are improved further when part of town is added to the analysis—for speakers in north Manchester, the two vowels are significantly more distinct from each other than they are in other parts of the city; this effect of neighbourhood appears to be independent of social class.

References:
Boersma, P. & Weenink, D. 2012. Praat: doing phonetics by computer [Computer program].
Labov, W., Ash, S., & Boberg, C. 2006. The Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology, and Sound Change. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Nycz, J. & Hall-Lew, L. 2014. Best practices in measuring vowel merger. Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics, Vol. 20, 2013. DOI: 10.1121/1.4894063
Rosenfelder, I., Fruehwald, J. Evanini, K. and Jiahong, Y. 2011. FAVE (Forced Alignment and Vowel Extraction) Program Suite. http://fave.ling.upenn.edu.
 

 Submitted by J Weckwerth

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