Low Back /a/ to Low Central /a/

[TERRY IRONS]

On Sun, 28 May 2000, Alice Faber wrote:

> >them are low-back. Kind of makes you wonder who Peterson and Barney
> >recorded.
>
> Well, given that they recorded in New Jersey and the women and
> children were mostly Middle Atlantic speakers (the men were more
> diverse), they might have had some NY-ish multithongal open-o tokens,
> and since they made a single measurement from each vowel (as I
> recall), they could easily gotten mid-back position for open-o. In
> the NY and CT younger speakers I have measurements for, it's not
> unusual for open-o to have a high back onset (as in GOOD), with
> movement down to the traditional low back position.
> --

A good analysis and response to PB is Hagiwara, "Dialect variation and
formant frequency: The American English vowels revisited," Jnl of
Acoustic Society of America 102 (1997): 655-658.  In addition to the
information he presents about Southern Californian English, he suggests
that there is a true lacuna of knowledge about American English vowels
and he presents a simple research challenge: that individual researchers,
perhaps students, conduct acoustic analyses of a dozen or so speakers
from specific regions.  This work, he argues, would fill a "significant
void in objective descriptions of American English"  (which they aint no
such thing generally, as is implied in works such as PB).


Virtually, Terry
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Terry Lynn Irons        t.irons at morehead-st.edu
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