An acoustic study of /o/ fronting among Lumbee English speakers in Robeson County, North Carolina

• Published in: Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics Vol. 36; no. 1
• Main Author: Bissell, Marie
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: 13.05.2019
• ISSN: 1939-800X
• DOI: 10.1121/2.0001342

This study examined both the extent to which Lumbee English speakers, a group of Native Americans residing in Robeson County, North Carolina, participated in /o/ fronting over apparent time and how their patterns of phonological conditioning of /o/ fronting compared with what has been previously reported for white speakers elsewhere (Luthin 1987, Watt and Tillotson 2001). In particular, it was unknown whether /o/ fronting in a ethnoracial minority population would conform with what has been reported for white English speakers, especially with respect to the blocking of /o/ fronting in pre-lateral and pre-nasal environments. Acoustic data from sociolinguistic interviews with nine Lumbee English speakers across three generations was analyzed. The results indicate that Lumbee English speakers produced fronter /o/ tokens over apparent time, suggesting a change in progress. Pre-nasal tokens patterned with pre-lateral tokens in that they were both far backer than /o/ tokens in all other environments. This finding demonstrates that the phonological conditioning of /o/ fronting is consistent across white and Native American English speakers. Overall, this study served to document low-salience sociophonetic patterns among an understudied group of American English speakers.