Abstract

This paper reports on a series of production and perception experiments designed to investigate the merger of /el/ and /æl/ in New Zealand English (NZE). 16 young NZE speakers completed a range of tasks involving nonsense and real words containing pre-lateral /e/ and /æ/. In production, both vowels were produced in an area of acoustic space closer to non-prelateral /æ/ than /e/, and were also noticeably centralised. This was true of all speakers, although the degree of merger varied across participants and was partially conditioned by social class. While most participants displayed merger in production, all were still largely able to exploit the distinction for the purposes of speech perception. The accuracy rates in the perception tasks were considerably higher for /el/ forms than /æl/ forms, and highest in monosyllabic words.

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