Contextual activation of Australia can affect New Zealanders' vowel productions

Abstract The short front vowels KIT /ɪ/, TRAP /ae/, and DRESS /ɛ/differ in their realization between speakers in New Zealand and Australian English. This paper analyses how New Zealanders produce these vowels when in an Australian-primed context. Two studies are undertaken. The first – a corpus analysis – looks at the realization of these vowels in New Zealanders' spontaneous talk about Australia. The second – an experiment – looks at the realization of these vowels in a word reading task, following the production of Australia-related lexical items. Both the experiment and the corpus analysis show differences in participant productions across Australia and non-Australia contexts. The corpus analysis shows a significant effect on the realization of the KIT and TRAP vowels, with Australian contexts associated with more Australian realizations. Both the corpus and the experiment reveal a significant interaction between speaker experience and context for DRESS. Only speakers who have ample previous experience with Australian English produce more Australian variants in an Australian context. These results highlight how different methodological approaches can provide different angles on the same question. Together, they show that subtle topic-based variation in speech production can occur. They also indicate that individual speakers' experience and beliefs can also play an important mediating role.

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