Producing and Perceiving the Canadian Vowel Shift : Evidence from a Montreal Community

Type of resource
Authors/collaborators
Title
Producing and Perceiving the Canadian Vowel Shift : Evidence from a Montreal Community
Abstract
The authors investigate interspeaker variation in the mid and low short vowels of Jewish Montreal English, analyzing the Canadian Shift in both production and perception. In production, they found that young women are leading in the retraction of /æ/ and the lowering and retraction of /ɛ/. They furthermore found that across speakers, the retraction of /æ/ is correlated with the lowering and retraction of /ɛ/, providing quantitative evidence that the movements of these two vowels are linked. The trajectory implied by their production data differs from what was reported in Montreal approximately one generation earlier. The authors point out that in contrast to reliable age differences in production, a vowel categorization task shows widespread intergenerational agreement in perception, highlighting a mismatch: in this speech community, there is evidently more systematic variation in production than in perception. They suggest that this is because all individuals are exposed to both innovative and conservative variants and must perceptually accommodate accordingly.
Publication
Language Variation and Change
Volume
Vol. 29
Issue
no. 1
Pages
79-100
Date
2017
Language
en
URL
Citation
Kettig, Thomas, and Bodo Winter. “Producing and Perceiving the Canadian Vowel Shift : Evidence from a Montreal Community.” Language Variation and Change Vol. 29, no. 1 (2017): 79–100. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Bodo_Winter/publication/315921659_Producing_and_perceiving_the_Canadian_Vowel_Shift_Evidence_from_a_Montreal_community/links/5afbde0a458515c00b6e611e/Producing-and-perceiving-the-Canadian-Vowel-Shift-Evidence-from-a-Montreal-community.pdf.
Find in a library
Permalink