A doll on the dole: Prelateral length mergers in Australian English

Abstract

The effects of prelateral coarticulation on vowels in Australian English sometimes result in the reduction of spectral contrastiveness in vowel pairs. As a result, some speakers may struggle to distinguish minimal pairs that differ only in these vowels prelaterally, for instance realising both doll and dole as /dəʉl/. This pilot study investigates the effect of this context-induced merger by testing the accuracy and reaction time of 10 young Australian English speakers from Melbourne in an AXB discrimination and categorisation task. Participants struggled to distinguish some prelaterally merged vowel pairs more than others. There were also significant differences between the categorisation a..