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Conference Presentations by James Smith
The Canadian Shift (Clarke, Elms & Youssef 1995) is a vowel change in progress that involves the ... more The Canadian Shift (Clarke, Elms & Youssef 1995) is a vowel change in progress that involves the lowering and retraction of front lax vowels in the KIT, DRESS, and TRAP lexical sets (Wells 1982). Canadian Shift is well studied in several urban Canadian communities: Toronto (Roeder & Jarmasz 2009, 2010), Thunder Bay (Roeder 2012), Winnipeg (Hagiwara 2006), Montreal (Boberg 2005, 2008), Halifax and Vancouver (Sadlier-Brown & Tamminga 2008). Studies of regional variation in Canadian English have largely focused on the speech of individual urban centers, and the patterns of variation in these large communities is taken to be the norm for the whole region. How these urban patterns are realized in the vast non-urban hinterland of rural Northern Ontario has yet to be investigated, as do the mechanisms of the spread of change from urban to rural speech communities.
I analyze conversational speech of 12 northern Ontario speakers (6 male, 6 female between the ages of 20 and 84) from Kirkland Lake, a small mining town 585 km north of Toronto, and Temiskaming Shores, a larger agricultural community 160 km north of Toronto . Participation in the Canadian Shift by speakers in these northern communities is compared to vowel data drawn from spoken vernacular of Toronto in order to test for transmission and diffusion of phonological variation in Canadian English.
A total of 9788 stressed KIT, DRESS, and TRAP vowel tokens were extracted from the speech of the two northern communities and compared to 1416 tokens of spontaneous Toronto speech. Lobanov-normalized F1 and F2 measurements were taken at temporal midpoint of each token using FAVE (Rosenfelder et al. 2011). Separate mixed-effects linear regression models predicting normalized F1 and F2 values for each Canadian Shift vowel class were performed in Rbrul (Johnson 2014). Results of these models showed inconsistent effects by the fixed effect age group across vowel class and community, suggesting that Canadian Shift is largely complete in all three communities. However, significant main effects for fixed effects of sex and community across all vowel classes point to socially motivated regional differences in production. This study presents evidence that the Canadian Shift has spread to remote northern Ontario communities through unbroken transmission across generations, not as a result of diffusion from a southern urban source (Labov 2003, 2007). Though the vowel patterns of two northern Ontario communities are not identical, results support the view that Canadian English in Toronto, Kirkland Lake, and Temiskaming Shores shares a common source brought to the north by the founding populations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The investigation of vowel changes in non-urban communities at considerable distance from their urban source contributes to our understanding of the trajectory of phonological change in Canadian English, and presents a unique opportunity to gain deeper insights into the social and linguistic motivations for regional linguistic variation in Canada.
The Canadian Shift (Clarke, Elms & Youssef 1995) is a vowel change in progress that involves the ... more The Canadian Shift (Clarke, Elms & Youssef 1995) is a vowel change in progress that involves the lowering and retraction of front lax vowels in the KIT, DRESS, and TRAP lexical sets (Wells 1982). Canadian Shift is well studied in several urban Canadian communities: Toronto (Roeder & Jarmasz 2009, 2010), Thunder Bay (Roeder 2012), Winnipeg (Hagiwara 2006), Montreal (Boberg 2005, 2008), Halifax and Vancouver (Sadlier-Brown & Tamminga 2008). Studies of regional variation in Canadian English have largely focused on the speech of individual urban centers, and the patterns of variation in these large communities is taken to be the norm for the whole region. How these urban patterns are realized in the vast non-urban hinterland of rural Northern Ontario has yet to be investigated, as do the mechanisms of the spread of change from urban to rural speech communities.
I analyze conversational speech of 12 northern Ontario speakers (6 male, 6 female between the ages of 20 and 84) from Kirkland Lake, a small mining town 585 km north of Toronto, and Temiskaming Shores, a larger agricultural community 160 km north of Toronto . Participation in the Canadian Shift by speakers in these northern communities is compared to vowel data drawn from spoken vernacular of Toronto in order to test for transmission and diffusion of phonological variation in Canadian English.
A total of 9788 stressed KIT, DRESS, and TRAP vowel tokens were extracted from the speech of the two northern communities and compared to 1416 tokens of spontaneous Toronto speech. Lobanov-normalized F1 and F2 measurements were taken at temporal midpoint of each token using FAVE (Rosenfelder et al. 2011). Separate mixed-effects linear regression models predicting normalized F1 and F2 values for each Canadian Shift vowel class were performed in Rbrul (Johnson 2014). Results of these models showed inconsistent effects by the fixed effect age group across vowel class and community, suggesting that Canadian Shift is largely complete in all three communities. However, significant main effects for fixed effects of sex and community across all vowel classes point to socially motivated regional differences in production. This study presents evidence that the Canadian Shift has spread to remote northern Ontario communities through unbroken transmission across generations, not as a result of diffusion from a southern urban source (Labov 2003, 2007). Though the vowel patterns of two northern Ontario communities are not identical, results support the view that Canadian English in Toronto, Kirkland Lake, and Temiskaming Shores shares a common source brought to the north by the founding populations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The investigation of vowel changes in non-urban communities at considerable distance from their urban source contributes to our understanding of the trajectory of phonological change in Canadian English, and presents a unique opportunity to gain deeper insights into the social and linguistic motivations for regional linguistic variation in Canada.
Sociophonetic Variation of Northern Ontario Vowels: A First Look Abstract This paper reports pr... more Sociophonetic Variation of Northern Ontario Vowels: A First Look
Abstract
This paper reports preliminary results of an ongoing project investigating regional and
social variation in Canadian English vowel production in northern Ontario. Canadian
English vowel variation is well studied in several urban communities; however, virtually
nothing is known of vowel production in rural Ontario. This paper analyzes the speech of 7
speakers from Kirkland Lake, Ontario, a small mining town 585 km north of Toronto. It
explores the participation of Kirkland Lake speakers in two salient changes in progress in
Canadian English: the Canadian Shift (CS - Clarke, Elms & Youssef 1995), involving the
lowering and retraction of front lax vowels in the KIT, DRESS, and TRAP lexical sets, and
fronting of the /uw/ vowel in the GOOSE lexical set (Labov, Ash & Boberg 2006). The study
has the following goals:
• Probe competing claims about the progress of these changes in light of observed
regional differences (e.g., Sadlier-Brown & Tamminga 2008; Roeder 2012)
• Evaluate evidence that CS and /uw/-fronting are structurally related (Boberg 2011)
12,908 tokens1 of 11 vowels in primary stress position were extracted from 9 hours of
sociolinguistic interviews. For CS vowels, normalized F1 and F2 values fall within
thresholds defined by Labov et al., indicating full participation by Kirkland Lake speakers.
However, these Kirkland Lake speakers also appear to lag behind the rest of Canada in
/uw/-fronting, exhibiting mean F2 of 1354 Hz, well below the 1720 Hz mean of Boberg
(2010). Though differences by age and sex suggest that /uw/-fronting is progressing in
apparent time, these results are incompatible with the view that /uw/ fronting is structurally
tied to CS. The longterm results of this study will add to previous accounts of regional
variation in Canadian English and contribute to our understanding of transmission and
diffusion of phonological change in Canadian English.
1The data for this study were extracted from the Transmission and Diffusion in Canadian English project corpus, funded
by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Tagliamonte 2010-2014; Tagliamonte 2014)
References
Boberg, Charles. 2005. The Canadian Shift in Montreal. Language Variation and Change 17:133–
154.
Boberg, Charles. 2008. Regional Phonetic Differentiation in Standard Canadian English. Journal of
English Linguistics, 36(2): 129-154.
Boberg, Charles. 2010. The English Language in Canada: Status, History and Comparative
Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Boberg, Charles. 2011. Reshaping the Vowel System: An Index of Phonetic Innovation in Canadian
English. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 17(2): 21-29.
Clarke, Sandra, Ford Elms, and Amani Youssef. 1995. The Third Dialect of English: Some
Canadian evidence. Language Variation and Change 7:209-228.
Hagiwara, Robert. 2006. Vowel Production in Winnipeg. Canadian Journal of Linguistics 51:127-41.
Hoffman, Michol. 2010. The role of social factors in the Canadian Vowel Shift: Evidence from
Toronto. American Speech, 85(2): 121-140.
Labov, William, Sharon Ash, and Charles Boberg. 2006.Atlas of North American English:
Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Roeder, Rebecca. 2012. The Canadian Shift in Two Ontario Cities. Special Issue of World
Englishes: Autonomy and Homogeneity in Canadian English. Guest editors Stefan Dollinger
and Sandra Clarke. World Englishes, 31(4): 478-492.
Roeder, Rebecca and Lidia-Gabriela Jarmasz. 2009. The lax vowel subsystem in Canadian English
revisited. Toronto Working Papers in Linguistics 31.
Roeder, Rebecca and Lidia-Gabriela Jarmasz. 2010. The Canadian Shift in Toronto. Canadian
Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique 55(3): 387-404.
Roeder, Rebecca and Matt Hunt Gardner. 2013. The Phonology of the Canadian Shift Revisited:
Thunder Bay and Cape Breton. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics
19(2): 161-170.
Sadlier-Brown, E. and M. Tamminga. 2008. The Canadian Shift: Coast to coast. In Proceedings of
the 2008 Annual Conference of the Canadian Linguistic Association: 1-14).
Tagliamonte, Sali, A. (2010-2013). Transmission and diffusion in Canadian English. Research
Grant, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. (SSHRCC). #410-101-
129.
Tagliamonte, Sali A. (2014). System and society in the evolution of change: The view from Canada.
In Green, E. & Meyer, C. (Eds.), Variability in Current World Englishes. Berlin and New York:
Mouton de Gruyter.
Goal of the study Identify linguistic and social factors that influence variation in intervocalic... more Goal of the study Identify linguistic and social factors that influence variation in intervocalic /nt/ clusters produced by native English speakers born and raised in the city of Toronto
This paper reports the results of a perceptual experiment involving the categorization of Russian... more This paper reports the results of a perceptual experiment involving the categorization of Russian liquid consonants by native speakers of Korean, Taiwanese Mandarin, Japanese, and Cantonese. Listeners were presented with stimuli containing plain and palatalized laterals (/l/ and / (/r/ and /rj/). The categorization task confirmed the results of an earlier discrimination experiment and revealed patterns of non-native perception that extend beyond simple segment-to-segment mappings.
Papers by James Smith
This paper reports the results of a perceptual experiment involving the categorization of Russian... more This paper reports the results of a perceptual experiment involving the categorization of Russian liquid consonants by native speakers of Korean, Taiwanese Mandarin, Japanese, and Cantonese. Listeners were presented with stimuli containing plain and palatalized ...
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2009
![Research paper thumbnail of Acoustic Properties of English [l] and [ɹ] Produced by Mandarin Chinese Speakers](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/31711793/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](This paper investigates the acoustic properties of English liquid consonants /l/ and /ɹ/ produced... more This paper investigates the acoustic properties of English liquid consonants /l/ and /ɹ/ produced by native speakers of Mandarin Chinese in order to explore how the phonetic properties of first language affect non-native production. The study presents the results of three experiments. In experiment 1, three adult male native speakers of Canadian English were recorded saying single-syllable English words with word-initial /l/ and /ɹ/. Acoustic measurements served as a control baseline of Canadian English for comparison with the acoustic properties of native Mandarin /l/ and /ɹ/ production and non-native production of the corresponding English liquids by Mandarin speakers. In experiment 2, eight adult male native Mandarin speakers were recorded saying single-syllable Mandarin words with word-initial /l/ and /ɹ/ to serve as a Mandarin Chinese control baseline for comparison to the acoustic properties of the production of Canadian English /l/ and /ɹ/ and to the results of the production of the corresponding non-native English liquids by Mandarin speakers. Experiment 3 determined how non-native production of English liquids differed from native Canadian English production and native production of corresponding Mandarin liquids. The same Mandarin speakers from experiment 2 were recorded saying the single-syllable English words from experiment 1. The results of the acoustic analysis showed that native English speakers produced English liquid consonants /l/ and /ɹ/ differently from speakers of Mandarin Chinese producing the same consonants in both native Mandarin words and in English words. Acoustic differences were attributed to specific articulatory differences in how these consonants were produced, and these differences are a direct result of differing patterns of cross-language phonetic categorization. iv
The Canadian Shift (Clarke, Elms & Youssef 1995) is a vowel change in progress that involves the ... more The Canadian Shift (Clarke, Elms & Youssef 1995) is a vowel change in progress that involves the lowering and retraction of front lax vowels in the KIT, DRESS, and TRAP lexical sets (Wells 1982). Canadian Shift is well studied in several urban Canadian communities: Toronto (Roeder & Jarmasz 2009, 2010), Thunder Bay (Roeder 2012), Winnipeg (Hagiwara 2006), Montreal (Boberg 2005, 2008), Halifax and Vancouver (Sadlier-Brown & Tamminga 2008). Studies of regional variation in Canadian English have largely focused on the speech of individual urban centers, and the patterns of variation in these large communities is taken to be the norm for the whole region. How these urban patterns are realized in the vast non-urban hinterland of rural Northern Ontario has yet to be investigated, as do the mechanisms of the spread of change from urban to rural speech communities.
I analyze conversational speech of 12 northern Ontario speakers (6 male, 6 female between the ages of 20 and 84) from Kirkland Lake, a small mining town 585 km north of Toronto, and Temiskaming Shores, a larger agricultural community 160 km north of Toronto . Participation in the Canadian Shift by speakers in these northern communities is compared to vowel data drawn from spoken vernacular of Toronto in order to test for transmission and diffusion of phonological variation in Canadian English.
A total of 9788 stressed KIT, DRESS, and TRAP vowel tokens were extracted from the speech of the two northern communities and compared to 1416 tokens of spontaneous Toronto speech. Lobanov-normalized F1 and F2 measurements were taken at temporal midpoint of each token using FAVE (Rosenfelder et al. 2011). Separate mixed-effects linear regression models predicting normalized F1 and F2 values for each Canadian Shift vowel class were performed in Rbrul (Johnson 2014). Results of these models showed inconsistent effects by the fixed effect age group across vowel class and community, suggesting that Canadian Shift is largely complete in all three communities. However, significant main effects for fixed effects of sex and community across all vowel classes point to socially motivated regional differences in production. This study presents evidence that the Canadian Shift has spread to remote northern Ontario communities through unbroken transmission across generations, not as a result of diffusion from a southern urban source (Labov 2003, 2007). Though the vowel patterns of two northern Ontario communities are not identical, results support the view that Canadian English in Toronto, Kirkland Lake, and Temiskaming Shores shares a common source brought to the north by the founding populations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The investigation of vowel changes in non-urban communities at considerable distance from their urban source contributes to our understanding of the trajectory of phonological change in Canadian English, and presents a unique opportunity to gain deeper insights into the social and linguistic motivations for regional linguistic variation in Canada.
The Canadian Shift (Clarke, Elms & Youssef 1995) is a vowel change in progress that involves the ... more The Canadian Shift (Clarke, Elms & Youssef 1995) is a vowel change in progress that involves the lowering and retraction of front lax vowels in the KIT, DRESS, and TRAP lexical sets (Wells 1982). Canadian Shift is well studied in several urban Canadian communities: Toronto (Roeder & Jarmasz 2009, 2010), Thunder Bay (Roeder 2012), Winnipeg (Hagiwara 2006), Montreal (Boberg 2005, 2008), Halifax and Vancouver (Sadlier-Brown & Tamminga 2008). Studies of regional variation in Canadian English have largely focused on the speech of individual urban centers, and the patterns of variation in these large communities is taken to be the norm for the whole region. How these urban patterns are realized in the vast non-urban hinterland of rural Northern Ontario has yet to be investigated, as do the mechanisms of the spread of change from urban to rural speech communities.
I analyze conversational speech of 12 northern Ontario speakers (6 male, 6 female between the ages of 20 and 84) from Kirkland Lake, a small mining town 585 km north of Toronto, and Temiskaming Shores, a larger agricultural community 160 km north of Toronto . Participation in the Canadian Shift by speakers in these northern communities is compared to vowel data drawn from spoken vernacular of Toronto in order to test for transmission and diffusion of phonological variation in Canadian English.
A total of 9788 stressed KIT, DRESS, and TRAP vowel tokens were extracted from the speech of the two northern communities and compared to 1416 tokens of spontaneous Toronto speech. Lobanov-normalized F1 and F2 measurements were taken at temporal midpoint of each token using FAVE (Rosenfelder et al. 2011). Separate mixed-effects linear regression models predicting normalized F1 and F2 values for each Canadian Shift vowel class were performed in Rbrul (Johnson 2014). Results of these models showed inconsistent effects by the fixed effect age group across vowel class and community, suggesting that Canadian Shift is largely complete in all three communities. However, significant main effects for fixed effects of sex and community across all vowel classes point to socially motivated regional differences in production. This study presents evidence that the Canadian Shift has spread to remote northern Ontario communities through unbroken transmission across generations, not as a result of diffusion from a southern urban source (Labov 2003, 2007). Though the vowel patterns of two northern Ontario communities are not identical, results support the view that Canadian English in Toronto, Kirkland Lake, and Temiskaming Shores shares a common source brought to the north by the founding populations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The investigation of vowel changes in non-urban communities at considerable distance from their urban source contributes to our understanding of the trajectory of phonological change in Canadian English, and presents a unique opportunity to gain deeper insights into the social and linguistic motivations for regional linguistic variation in Canada.
Sociophonetic Variation of Northern Ontario Vowels: A First Look Abstract This paper reports pr... more Sociophonetic Variation of Northern Ontario Vowels: A First Look
Abstract
This paper reports preliminary results of an ongoing project investigating regional and
social variation in Canadian English vowel production in northern Ontario. Canadian
English vowel variation is well studied in several urban communities; however, virtually
nothing is known of vowel production in rural Ontario. This paper analyzes the speech of 7
speakers from Kirkland Lake, Ontario, a small mining town 585 km north of Toronto. It
explores the participation of Kirkland Lake speakers in two salient changes in progress in
Canadian English: the Canadian Shift (CS - Clarke, Elms & Youssef 1995), involving the
lowering and retraction of front lax vowels in the KIT, DRESS, and TRAP lexical sets, and
fronting of the /uw/ vowel in the GOOSE lexical set (Labov, Ash & Boberg 2006). The study
has the following goals:
• Probe competing claims about the progress of these changes in light of observed
regional differences (e.g., Sadlier-Brown & Tamminga 2008; Roeder 2012)
• Evaluate evidence that CS and /uw/-fronting are structurally related (Boberg 2011)
12,908 tokens1 of 11 vowels in primary stress position were extracted from 9 hours of
sociolinguistic interviews. For CS vowels, normalized F1 and F2 values fall within
thresholds defined by Labov et al., indicating full participation by Kirkland Lake speakers.
However, these Kirkland Lake speakers also appear to lag behind the rest of Canada in
/uw/-fronting, exhibiting mean F2 of 1354 Hz, well below the 1720 Hz mean of Boberg
(2010). Though differences by age and sex suggest that /uw/-fronting is progressing in
apparent time, these results are incompatible with the view that /uw/ fronting is structurally
tied to CS. The longterm results of this study will add to previous accounts of regional
variation in Canadian English and contribute to our understanding of transmission and
diffusion of phonological change in Canadian English.
1The data for this study were extracted from the Transmission and Diffusion in Canadian English project corpus, funded
by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Tagliamonte 2010-2014; Tagliamonte 2014)
References
Boberg, Charles. 2005. The Canadian Shift in Montreal. Language Variation and Change 17:133–
154.
Boberg, Charles. 2008. Regional Phonetic Differentiation in Standard Canadian English. Journal of
English Linguistics, 36(2): 129-154.
Boberg, Charles. 2010. The English Language in Canada: Status, History and Comparative
Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Boberg, Charles. 2011. Reshaping the Vowel System: An Index of Phonetic Innovation in Canadian
English. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 17(2): 21-29.
Clarke, Sandra, Ford Elms, and Amani Youssef. 1995. The Third Dialect of English: Some
Canadian evidence. Language Variation and Change 7:209-228.
Hagiwara, Robert. 2006. Vowel Production in Winnipeg. Canadian Journal of Linguistics 51:127-41.
Hoffman, Michol. 2010. The role of social factors in the Canadian Vowel Shift: Evidence from
Toronto. American Speech, 85(2): 121-140.
Labov, William, Sharon Ash, and Charles Boberg. 2006.Atlas of North American English:
Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Roeder, Rebecca. 2012. The Canadian Shift in Two Ontario Cities. Special Issue of World
Englishes: Autonomy and Homogeneity in Canadian English. Guest editors Stefan Dollinger
and Sandra Clarke. World Englishes, 31(4): 478-492.
Roeder, Rebecca and Lidia-Gabriela Jarmasz. 2009. The lax vowel subsystem in Canadian English
revisited. Toronto Working Papers in Linguistics 31.
Roeder, Rebecca and Lidia-Gabriela Jarmasz. 2010. The Canadian Shift in Toronto. Canadian
Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique 55(3): 387-404.
Roeder, Rebecca and Matt Hunt Gardner. 2013. The Phonology of the Canadian Shift Revisited:
Thunder Bay and Cape Breton. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics
19(2): 161-170.
Sadlier-Brown, E. and M. Tamminga. 2008. The Canadian Shift: Coast to coast. In Proceedings of
the 2008 Annual Conference of the Canadian Linguistic Association: 1-14).
Tagliamonte, Sali, A. (2010-2013). Transmission and diffusion in Canadian English. Research
Grant, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. (SSHRCC). #410-101-
129.
Tagliamonte, Sali A. (2014). System and society in the evolution of change: The view from Canada.
In Green, E. & Meyer, C. (Eds.), Variability in Current World Englishes. Berlin and New York:
Mouton de Gruyter.
Goal of the study Identify linguistic and social factors that influence variation in intervocalic... more Goal of the study Identify linguistic and social factors that influence variation in intervocalic /nt/ clusters produced by native English speakers born and raised in the city of Toronto
This paper reports the results of a perceptual experiment involving the categorization of Russian... more This paper reports the results of a perceptual experiment involving the categorization of Russian liquid consonants by native speakers of Korean, Taiwanese Mandarin, Japanese, and Cantonese. Listeners were presented with stimuli containing plain and palatalized laterals (/l/ and / (/r/ and /rj/). The categorization task confirmed the results of an earlier discrimination experiment and revealed patterns of non-native perception that extend beyond simple segment-to-segment mappings.
This paper reports the results of a perceptual experiment involving the categorization of Russian... more This paper reports the results of a perceptual experiment involving the categorization of Russian liquid consonants by native speakers of Korean, Taiwanese Mandarin, Japanese, and Cantonese. Listeners were presented with stimuli containing plain and palatalized ...
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2009
This paper investigates the acoustic properties of English liquid consonants /l/ and /ɹ/ produced... more This paper investigates the acoustic properties of English liquid consonants /l/ and /ɹ/ produced by native speakers of Mandarin Chinese in order to explore how the phonetic properties of first language affect non-native production. The study presents the results of three experiments. In experiment 1, three adult male native speakers of Canadian English were recorded saying single-syllable English words with word-initial /l/ and /ɹ/. Acoustic measurements served as a control baseline of Canadian English for comparison with the acoustic properties of native Mandarin /l/ and /ɹ/ production and non-native production of the corresponding English liquids by Mandarin speakers. In experiment 2, eight adult male native Mandarin speakers were recorded saying single-syllable Mandarin words with word-initial /l/ and /ɹ/ to serve as a Mandarin Chinese control baseline for comparison to the acoustic properties of the production of Canadian English /l/ and /ɹ/ and to the results of the production of the corresponding non-native English liquids by Mandarin speakers. Experiment 3 determined how non-native production of English liquids differed from native Canadian English production and native production of corresponding Mandarin liquids. The same Mandarin speakers from experiment 2 were recorded saying the single-syllable English words from experiment 1. The results of the acoustic analysis showed that native English speakers produced English liquid consonants /l/ and /ɹ/ differently from speakers of Mandarin Chinese producing the same consonants in both native Mandarin words and in English words. Acoustic differences were attributed to specific articulatory differences in how these consonants were produced, and these differences are a direct result of differing patterns of cross-language phonetic categorization. iv