Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines several aspects of the “Short Front Vowel Shift” (SFVS) in Canadian English, known in most previous research as the “Canadian Vowel Shift.” It is based on acoustic analysis of a list of one hundred words produced by sixty-one Canadian and thirty-one American university students. The analysis focuses on three questions: (1) the relations among the vowels involved in the shift, including relations with vowels not traditionally considered part of the shift; (2) the behavior of individual words in each vowel category, which displays allophonic variation; and (3) the role of regional and national identity (western versus eastern Canadian, and Canadian versus American) and speaker sex in predicting the degree of participation in the shift, which is measured with a unitary quantitative index of the shift that is proposed here for the first time. The analysis finds that the short front vowels (kit, dress, and trap) lower and retract as a set, but that shifts of several back vowels (particularly foot, goat, and strut) are also correlated but not necessarily structurally connected with these; that following voiceless fricatives favor the SFVS while preceding velars disfavor it; that women are more advanced in the shift than men; that there is no regional difference within Canada in the progress of the shift; and, most surprisingly, that, once the American comparison group is restricted to those with a low-back merger, Americans are more shifted than their Canadian peers, calling into question the association of the shift with Canada in most previous research on Canadian English.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".