The southern vowel shift in women from Mississippi

Though previous research has documented the Southern Vowel Shift (SVS) in Alabama and Tennessee, no research has focused on the SVS in Mississippi. The majority of SVS research has also focused on European Americans and assumed that African Americans do not participate in the shift. The SVS consists of three stages: /aɪ/ monophthongization; lowering and centralizing of /e/ toward /ɛ/ and raising and peripheralizing of /ɛ/ toward /e/; and lowering and centralizing of /i/ toward /ɪ/ and raising and peripheralizing of /ɪ/ toward /i/. In this study, data were collected from women from northern (N = 11) and central (N = 24) Mississippi, with central residents evenly recruited from urban and rural areas. Of these, 17 were European American and 18 were African American. Participants read a list of words including the target vowels in [b_t] and [b_d] frames, and then F1 and F2 were measured at five equidistant points. Normalized formant values were analyzed to determine to what extent participants exhibited the SVS. The results suggest that African American women from Mississippi produce more features of the SVS than European American women from the same region.