vowels...

[Alice Faber]

>
>One thing that i've seen sporadically there but haven't looked at properly
>is an occasionally merger of _dull_ and _pull_.

I'd love to know more about this one, having it in my own speech. Of
course, /U/ and /^/ are pretty close for me also before other vowels,
but not merged. Way back when I first learned IPA, I had a hard time
learning to transcribe those vowels correctly. When I started working
with Marianna on vowels before /l/, I had to memorize the
etymological vowel classes for <-ull> words. This was a hard learned
lesson, after miscoding a data set! Before that, I'd been absolutely
unaware of the merger.

>
>In all of these cases, where there's a merger in production, the target is
>[U]. The four vowels *only* merge before /l/; the distinctions are
>consistently and vigorously maintained otherwise.

I think that's right, bearing in mind that for some of our Utah
speakers, /U/ in other contexts is fairly front.

Alice Faber, Manager                                         (860) 685-2954
Infant Language Development Laboratory                  afaber at wesleyan.edu
400 Judd Hall--Wesleyan University                               or
Middletown, CT 06459                             faber at pop.haskins.yale.edu