Production and perception asymmetries in the Canadian vowel shift
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Canadian Shift (CS), a lowering and backing of the KIT, DRESS, and TRAP vowels, has been extensively investigated in the speech of English Canadians. However, its effect on the perceptual categorization of vowels has received little attention. The role of perception in ongoing vowel shifts remains comparatively under-researched. By testing participants both in production and in perception, this study gives a unique view into an ongoing sound change. Participants from Montreal in two age groups were recorded reading a list of 44 sentences containing words with stressed /ɛ/, /æ/, /ɔ/, and /ʌ/ vowels. Participants also categorized 96 synthesized vowel stimuli. While the production data clearly replicated the CS, in perception, shift-leaders did not categorize vowels very differently.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it