Exploring the relationship between production and perception in the mid front vowels of U.S. English

A combined vowel perception/vowel production study was designed to address the question of how variability in speech production relates to variability in speech perception. For the study, participants from three different U.S. dialect regions (North, South and West) completed an online vowel identification experiment. A subset of participants from each region also provided speech samples. In this paper, we acoustically analyze these participants’ vowel productions for the mid front vowel classes, and compare these productions to the same speakers’ performance on a mid front vowel categorization task, asking what kinds of links exist between speakers’ actual speech production and their perception of vowel categories. We are particularly interested in the role that regional vowel shifts currently affecting speech in the North and the South of the U.S. (the Northern Cities Shift and the Southern Vowel Shift, respectively) play in both production and perception. In addition to examining differences across regions, we investigate intra-regional variation in terms of individuals’ productive realization of shift and the extent to which this correlates with the same individuals’ perceptions. Results show that both regional affiliation and individual participation in regional shifts in production play a role in perception of the /e/-/ɛ/ continuum.