A preliminary examination of the gender role in back-vowel fronting in Central Louisiana

In addition to the Southern Vowel Shift that involves /ɛ ɪ/ fronting, high back vowels also tend to be fronted in white Southern U.S. speech (Labov, Ash, & Boberg, 2006; Thomas, 2001). The tense /u/ is the first to shift in the back-vowel system, followed by the lax /ʊ/. Gender effect on the degree of fronting has been reported for one vowel but not the other: Male speakers lead in /u/fronting, whereas /ʊ/ fronting occurs more or less uniformly across speakers of different genders (Clopper, Pisoni, & de Jong; Fridland, 2001). This study provides a preliminary examination of the role of gender in the relative degree of back vowel fronting in young adult speakers from Central Louisiana. They were recorded producing words with target vowels in a variety of tasks: word list and passage reading, sentence creation, and informal conversation. The formant values were analyzed with a reference to other vowels in each speaker and with a reference to average values for Southern U.S. English reported in previous rese...