1 research outputs found
The merging of the goat and thought vowels in Tyneside English: evidence from production and perception
Ph. D. Thesis.This thesis presents a sociolinguistic investigation into the potential merging of the goat
and thought vowels in contemporary Tyneside English. Following Watt’s (1998)
observation that these two vowels are homophonous for some Tyneside speakers, the
main study examines the extent to which goat and thought are found to overlap in
both speech production and speech perception. Given the lack of previous research on
this sound change, evidence from sociolinguistic interviews and experimental perception
tasks are evaluated here in order to determine whether there is a current
goat-thought merger-in-progress in Tyneside.
The speech production data is made up of conversational interviews with 28 speakers,
obtained from the Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English. An acoustic analysis
was performed on this interview data in order to assess the merging of goat and thought
in phonetic space. Both static (one-measurement) and dynamic (vowel trajectory) data
were collected, and several different measures of merger were employed in the analysis.
Results showed that many speakers exhibit considerable overlap of goat and thought
in the vowel space due to a lowering of the goat vowel, while findings from Pillai scores
and Generalised Additive Mixed Models indicated that young females have the greatest
overlap between the two vowels.
For the investigation into how goat and thought are perceived in Tyneside, 43
listeners took part in a vowel perception experiment. Discrimination and identification
tasks were carried out so that listeners could be assessed on their ability to distinguish
and categorise these vowels. Using measures of accuracy, sensitivity, and reaction time,
results showed that listeners were significantly less accurate and significantly slower in
responding to goat-thought trials than to trials containing control stimuli. Such
findings suggest some degree of perceptual confusability between these two vowels for the
Tyneside listeners, and provide further evidence of the merging of goat and thought
in the speech community.
Comparing the results of the production and perception analyses, the overall findings
indicated that goat and thought are merging in Tyneside. However, some evidence
of goat-fronting is also found in both the production and perception data, which may
prevent further progression toward a full phonemic goat-thought merger in Tyneside
English.Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC