Merged perception of PIN and PEN: Interspeaker variation or partial merger in perception?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Merged production of /ɪ/ and /ɛ/ before nasal consonants is well documented in Southern US English. In a previous study of merged perception of the /ɪ/-/ɛ/ contrast, we found that Southern listeners were partially merged in perception, in the sense that they were less sensitive to the contrast pre-nasally than pre-orally, but still not fully merged. However, the existence of individual partially merged Southern listeners was left unexplored. In the present study, we ask how many of the Southern individuals are partially merged in perception, as opposed to being fully merged or not merged. A 2AFC perception task asked US listeners from inside or outside the South to categorize stimuli on continua from bid to bed and bin to Ben. We fit a logistic regression model on probability of /ɛ/ responses as a function of continuum step, coda nasality, and individual. We found that most Southern listeners were partially merged, and the remainder were split between fully merged and not merged. In contrast, most non-Southern listeners were not merged. This finding supports the generalization that partial merger in perception is possible at the individual level, and indeed it is the most common outcome for the Southern individuals in this study.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".