Producing and Perceiving the Canadian Vowel Shift: Evidence from a Montreal Community

This paper investigates inter-speaker variation in the non-high monophthongal vowels of Jewish Montreal English, analyzing the Canadian Shift in both production and perception. In production, we find that young women are leading in the retraction of /æ/ and the lowering and retraction of /ɛ/. We furthermore find that across speakers, the retraction of /æ/ is correlated with the lowering and retraction of /ɛ/, providing quantitative evidence that the movement of these two vowels is linked. The trajectory implied by our production data differs from what was reported in Montreal approximately one generation earlier. In contrast to reliable age differences in production, a vowel categorization task shows widespread intergenerational agreement in perception, highlighting a mismatch: in this speech community, there is evidently more systematic variation in production than in perception. We suggest that this is because all individuals are exposed to both innovative and conservative variants and must perceptually accommodate accordingly.