{"doi":"10.1121/1.4808518","title":"Are vowels in African American English affected by Southern vowel shift?","abstract":"<jats:p>There is a debate regarding whether the variety of speech called African American Vernacular English (AAVE) participates in any of the vowel shifts identified in today’s American English. Because pronunciation of vowels in AAVE has never been studied with sufficient experimental rigor, it is unknown whether the vowel system of AAVE differs from those of closely-related regional variants of American English. The present experiment examines the apparent resistance of AAVE to assimilation into Southern American English (SAE) and seeks to determine the presence or absence of Southern Vowel Shift in the speech of speakers of AAVE. Acoustic measures of AAVE vowels produced by male speakers born and raised in Statesville, NC (Piedmont region) are compared with the same measures of SAE vowels spoken by European-American male speakers living in western North Carolina. Acoustic measures (obtained from fourteen monophthongs and diphthongs in /&amp;lt;phone&amp;gt;h—&amp;lt;phone&amp;gt;d/ context) included dynamic formant pattern, extended vowel space area for each speaker, the amount of frequency change for F1 and F2 at two temporal points located close to vowel onset and offset (vector length), and vowel duration. These measures will establish both systemic and vowel inherent characteristics within these two varieties of English. Dialectal differences will be discussed. [Work supported by NIH NIDCD R01 DC006871.]</jats:p>","journal":"The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America","year":2007,"id":668078,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":0,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":null,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":false,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":null,"fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":1124544,"name":"Ewa Jacewicz","orcid":"0000-0002-7501-2634","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1124545,"name":"Robert A. Fox","orcid":"0000-0003-0986-676X","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1716457,"name":"Yolanda F. Holt","orcid":null,"position":0,"is_corresponding":false}],"reference_count":0,"raw_metadata":{"citation_network_status":"fetched"},"created_at":"2026-08-13T20:02:09.541856Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}