The merging of the goat and thought vowels in Tyneside English: evidence from production and perception

Abstract

This thesis presents a sociolinguistic investigation into the potential merging of the goat and thought vowels in contemporary Tyneside English. Following Watt’s (1998) observation that these two vowels are homophonous for some Tyneside speakers, the main study examines the extent to which goat and thought are found to overlap in both speech production and speech perception. Given the lack of previous research on this sound change, evidence from sociolinguistic interviews and experimental perception tasks are evaluated here in order to determine whether there is a current goat-thought merger-in-progress in Tyneside. The speech production data is made up of conversational interviews with 28 speakers, obtained from the Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English. An acoustic analysis was performed on this interview data in order to assess the merging of goat and thought in phonetic space. Both static (one-measurement) and dynamic (vowel trajectory) data were collected, and several different measures of merger were employed in the analysis. Results showed that many speakers exhibit considerable overlap of goat and thought in the vowel space due to a lowering of the goat vowel, while findings from Pillai scores and Generalised Additive Mixed Models indicated that young females have the greatest overlap between the two vowels. For the investigation into how goat and thought are perceived in Tyneside, 43 listeners took part in a vowel perception experiment. Discrimination and identification tasks were carried out so that listeners could be assessed on their ability to distinguish and categorise these vowels. Using measures of accuracy, sensitivity, and reaction time, results showed that listeners were significantly less accurate and significantly slower in responding to goat-thought trials than to trials containing control stimuli. Such findings suggest some degree of perceptual confusability between these two vowels for the Tyneside listeners, and provide further evidence of the merging of goat and thought in the speech community. Comparing the results of the production and perception analyses, the overall findings indicated that goat and thought are merging in Tyneside. However, some evidence of goat-fronting is also found in both the production and perception data, which may prevent further progression toward a full phonemic goat-thought merger in Tyneside English.