Chapter 3
Effects of Consonantal Context on the
Pronunciation of /æ/ in the English of Speakers of
Mexican Heritage from South Central Michigan
Rebecca Roeder, University of North Carolina Charlotte
- Introduction
This study investigates whether coarticulatory effects on the pronuncia-
tion of /æ/ 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 /æ/ pre-nasally—a feature that
is prevalent in local Anglo speech—in female respondents under 25 years
of age. T-tests reveal no statistically signi¿ cant raising of /æ/ before nasals
in the other ten speakers, however, providing a counterexample to Labov’s
hypothesis that some raising of /æ/ 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 /æ/-raising in a pre-nasal
environment in Mexican American speakers of English in Texas. Results for
other phonetic environments agree with previous sociophonetic and labora-
tory phonology ¿ ndings.
1.1 Background
Laboratory studies on the conditioning effects of phonetic environment on
vowel formant frequencies in English have generally paid little attention to
dialect variation. Throughout his work, Kenneth Stevens has provided evi-
dence that the majority of coarticulatory effects found in language are not
speaker-controlled but are instead due to “inherent dynamic properties of the
articulatory structures and of the neuromuscular system that controls them”
(Stevens and House 1963: 122). Stevens and House do state that speakers can
manipulate phonetic cues for the functional purpose of increasing perceptual