The /ay/s have It the perception of /ay/ as a north-south stereotype in United States English

Abstract

There is no doubt that /ay/ monophthongization is one of the principal caricatures of US speech. Few studies, however, have made use of phonetic detail in investigating regional or group identification and caricature, and none has addressed the possibility that a perceptual continuum parallels the continuous nature of some phonetic variables. This study attempts to determine if the degree of /ay/ monophthongization is relevant to perception along a north-south line of nine voices stretching from Saginaw, Michigan to Dothan, Alabama, the same used in an earlier study of dialect recognition by the second author. Some characteristics of both the speaker (sex) and hearer (sex, region) are also explored.