Abstract 

    The merger of / ɑ / and / ɔ / has long been observed in both the United States and Canada, but debates continue concerning its exact provenance as well as its phonetic realization. A tape recording of three female voices representing three distinct dialect regions and reading a passage containing the words Don and dawn was played to 222 undergraduates at Ohio University, most of whom were from three general dialect regions of Ohio. Listeners were asked to answer a hypothetical question based on events in the story. Their answers reflected their interpretation of a key word in the passage as Don or dawn based in part on the phonetic shape of the vowel in each reader’s voice. Results show that only the Northern Indiana voice elicited a clear distinction between the two target words; that is, her phonetic realizations were heard as representing the classic distinction between / ɑ / and / ɔ /. However, the distinction also was sharpest only in the answers from Northern Ohioans, who share the same Inland North dialect region. The other two voices contained the merger of the two phonemes toward /ɑ /, though with slightly different phonetic realizations; these appear to have elicited ambiguous answers depending on the listeners’ own perceptions of what those realizations represent. The shifting link between speakers’ own vowel productions and their perceptions of those vowels is evidenced in these results.

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