Abstract

New Zealand English (NZE) is one of a number of varieties of English that exhibit a qualitative merger of the START and STRUT vowels. Such a qualitative merger might lead to an expectation that quantitative differences are crucial to the identification of stimuli containing these vowels. To the extent that the qualitative merger is variably complete for different speaker groups, we might also expect listeners’ sensitivity to quantitative (as opposed to qualitative) distinctions to depend on characteristics of the speaker, as well as on their own speaker-group membership. These questions are addressed through a lexical decision experiment, which confirms the importance of the quantity distinction of these vowels in NZE, and indicates that there is some sensitivity in participants’ responses to social variables. Importantly, the results suggest that this sensitivity is located within the lexicon, in a way that would seem to support an exemplar-based approach to word recognition.

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