Finally out at Journal of #Phonetics: our corpus-based acoustic study of #AmericanEnglish #schwa and #VowelReduction

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0095447022000730

We show that all vowels *including schwa* assimilate to context (as expected), but they also neutralize toward [ᵻ] (a mid-high position).

This is actually pretty surprising! Because the dominant views are neutralization (to schwa; phonologists' take) or assimilation (to context; phoneticians' take), but vowels do both.

So, what's going on?

Finally out at Journal of #Phonetics: our corpus-based acoustic study of #AmericanEnglish #schwa and #VowelReduction

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0095447022000730

We show that all vowels *including schwa* assimilate to context (as expected), but they also neutralize toward [ᵻ] (a mid-high position).

This is actually pretty surprising! Because the dominant views are neutralization (to schwa; phonologists' take) or assimilation (to context; phoneticians' take), but vowels do both.

So, what's going on?

Paper accepted at Journal of Phonetics. The results are the same as what we thought originally (https://psyarxiv.com/gwkvh/), but our interpretation of the findings changed substantially: even the title changed. I'll toot some more about it when the paper is out, but if you'd like a sneak peak, here's our take on American English schwa, what vowels do when their duration gets short, and the implications for vowel neutralization.

https://urielcpublic.s3.amazonaws.com/papers/CohenPriva_Strand_Schwa-Accepted.pdf

#VowelReduction #Schwa #Phonetics