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This study seeks to map the perceptual vowel space of front vowel phonemes undergoing merger before voiced velars in Pacific Northwest English (PNWE). In production, most speakers spectrally merge /Eg, eg/ at a point between their non-prevelar counterparts /E, e/, but the height of /aeg/ is more variable. With variable production in the speech community, a question of perception arises: do Northwesterners maintain the same category boundaries for prevelar front vowels as non-prevelars, or are the prevelars merged in perception as they often are in production? This study addresses the question by mapping the perceptual space of front vowels in prevelar vs. precoronal contexts. Stimuli were created to synthesize an initial /b/ followed by 24 front-vowel formant value combinations (F1, F2) with no offglide or coda transitions. Twenty Northwestern subjects were told that each stimulus was the first part of a word that had been cut off in the middle, and they indicated which word they heard with a button press. In the first three blocks of randomized stimuli presentation, the word choices were in the shape /b d/: bad, bid, bayed, bed, bead ; the second three blocks used the same randomly-presented stimuli (unbeknownst to subjects), but the word choices were /b g/: bag, big, bagel, beg, beagle. This design forces lexical access during the task, as subjects must imagine they are hearing words, not contextless phonemes. The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 presents background information on the merger in production, followed by predictions for perception. Section 3 describes the experimental design, stimuli creation, and response procedures. Section 4 presents results, and Section 5 concludes with discussion and future work.

Perceptual Distribution of Merging Phonemes