The Short-a Nasal System: how does it get so tense?

Presented at the Canadian Linguistics Association annual meeting, Brock University, 2014.

This paper investigates the production of the low front vowel /æ/ which undergoes “tensing” and “raising” (Ferguson, 1972; Labov, 1989) when followed by a nasal consonant in some dialects of English (Labov, Ash and Boberg 2006). Speakers in their early twenties, and life long residents of the province of Newfoundland read a word list which included five tokens of both hand and hat. All speakers exhibited significantly lower F1 and higher F2 values for the vowel in the word hand compared to hat. As a way to explain the acoustic differences found in nasal systems, we test the model outlined by Krakow et al. (1988), that such lowering and raising is a result of co-articulation between the vowel and the following nasal consonant.