The effects of phonetic environment on English /æ/ among speakers of Mexican heritage in Michigan

Abstract

This study investigates whether coarticulatory effects on the pronunciation of /ae/ display previously unattested patterns in the English of Mexican Americans from Lansing, Michigan. The analysis is based on wordlist data from sixteen lifelong residents of Michigan who are also native speakers of English. Findings show extreme raising of /ae/ pre-nasally—a feature that is prevalent in local Anglo speech—in female respondents under 25. T-tests reveal no statistically significant raising of /ae/ before nasals in the other ten speakers, however, providing a counterexample to Labov’s hypothesis that some raising of /ae/ in a pre-nasal environment occurs in almost every dialect of American English (Labov 1994: 197). These results concur with Thomas (2001), who found a lack of /ae/-raising in a prenasal environment in Mexican American speakers of English in Texas. Results for other phonetic environments agree with previous sociophonetic and laboratory phonology findings.

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