In his foundational book on accents of English, Wells (1982: 374–5) describes the apparent merger of the vowels in the nurse and north lexical sets in Tyneside English (‘Geordie’) as follows: ‘In the broadest Geordie the lexical set nurse is merged with north, /ɔː/: work [wɔːk], first [fɔːst], shirt [ʃɔːt] (= short).’

In previous work, we have found that New Zealand listeners who produce merged tokens of near and square can accurately distinguish between the vowels in perception even though they report that they are guessing. The ability to distinguish the vowels is affected by a variety of factors for these listeners, including the likelihood that the speaker and experimenter maintain the distinction (Hay et al. 2006b; Hay et al. 2010). In this article, we report on experiments that examine the production and perception of real and nonsense words in the context of two mergers: the Ellen/Allan merger in New Zealand English and the lot/thought merger found in American English. The results demonstrate that speakers’ degree of merger depends at least partially on whether the word is a real or nonsense word. Additionally, the results indicate that a token's real word status affects the merger differently in production and perception. We argue that these results provide evidence in favour of a hybrid model of speech production and perception, one with both abstract phoneme-level representations and acoustically detailed episodic representations.

The article tests the generalisation of the curvilinear hypothesis and the tendency of females to lead linguistic change in vocalic mergers on the basis of two mergers currently in progress in Charleston, South Carolina: the low-back merger and the pin–pen merger. It is based on sociolinguistic interviews with 100 informants, aged 8–90, covering the socioeconomic spectrum of the city. The speech of 90 of the informants is analysed acoustically; it is supplemented with minimal-pair tests and word list reading. F1/F2 measurements and minimal-pair test results are subjected to a series of multiple linear regression analyses, with social class, gender, age and style as independent variables. While the low-back merger is a change from below showing a female lead and a curvilinear effect of social class, the pin–pen merger shows a decreasing monotonic relationship with social class and no female advantage. The difference is argued to be due to the two mergers being at different levels of social awareness.

This article reports the results of an experimental investigation into listeners' evaluative reactions towards the nurse~square merger in the north-west of England, in an attempt to shed light on its salience. Although speakers across England's north-west have a nurse~square merger, its realisation differs: in Liverpool, speakers typically merge to a mid front [ɛː], while speakers from St Helens, just 20km further east, merge to a mid central [ɜː]. To test listeners' responses to each variant, we presented two groups of listeners from each of these localities with read sentence data from a single speaker. The speaker was from the north-west of England and had a centralised nurse~square vowel in his native accent (representing the St Helens model). To achieve a matched-guise, the original nurse~square vowels were acoustically manipulated to give the impression of fronting (representing the Liverpool model). Listeners from Liverpool and St Helens were asked to react to guises along the status dimension, and their reaction was measured in real-time using bespoke audience response software administered via the web. The novelty in this approach is that it can be used not only to show that listeners do indeed react to the guises, but also to examine precisely when this reaction takes place. Our results show that (a) overall, speakers with a nurse~square merger are not rated highly on the status dimension, regardless of whether they have a merger to a front or central vowel; (b) listeners' real-time reactions can be correlated with instances of nurse and square; and (c) listeners' responses to nurse can be different from responses to square. We discuss these results in relation to the salience of this merger in particular and to salience in general. We suggest that the salience of nurse and square is related to the local social context and the micro-linguistic context in which they appear.

This article presents data on the acquisition of the low back vowel contrast by native speakers of Canadian English who have moved as adults to the New York City region, examining how these speakers who natively possess a single low back vowel category have acquired the low back vowel distinction of the new ambient dialect. The speakers show remarkable first dialect stability with respect to their low back vowel system, even after many years of new dialect exposure: in minimal pair contexts, nearly all of the speakers continue to produce and perceive a single vowel category. However, in word list and conversational contexts, the majority of speakers exhibit a small but significant phonetic difference between words like cot and caught, reflecting the separation of these word classes in the new dialect to which they are exposed; moreover, the realization of these words shows frequency effects consistent with a lexically gradual divergence of the two vowels. These findings are discussed in terms of their implications for theories of phonological representation and change, as well as their methodological implications for the study of mergers- and splits-in-progress.

During a merger-in-progress, occasionally one or two speakers will exhibit an unusual phonological pattern reminiscent of flip-flop (Labov et al. 1972). In such cases, the merging vowels appear to move past the point of coalescence in at least one phonetic dimension; difference is maintained but the vowel quality is opposite to the historical pattern on one or both dimensions. Flip-flop between the cot and caught vowels occurs for two speakers in a recent sample from San Francisco, California. The community shows robust change in progress toward a lower and fronter caught vowel nucleus, and no change in apparent time for cot. Further analysis shows that this is leading to a change in apparent time toward merger, and that the rate of vowel convergence is stronger among Chinese Americans than European Americans. The two speakers who produce flip-flop are seen to represent a key transitional generation with respect to the ethnic identity of the neighborhood, where flip-flop may be but one linguistic consequence of a lifetime of active negotiation between conflicting local meanings. The analysis suggests that ethnographic detail and attention to individual outliers allows for more comprehensive models of the range of phenomena associated with vowel mergers.