A perceptual investigation of the DRESS-TRAP vowel merger in Singapore English

Abstract

Singapore English (SgE) is often described as having a more formal standard called Singapore Standard English, and a less formal standard or vernacular called Singapore Colloquial English. However, these varieties share certain linguistic features, such as the realisation of phones. This study investigates two phones, namely the DRESS and TRAP vowels, which have undergone a merger in SgE. In particular, this study aims to understand the speech perception of this merger. Through the use of an experiment, 55 participants were recruited to contribute to this study, volunteering their speech perception data and some speech production data. The findings show that (i) a DRESS-TRAP merger is more apparent in younger Singaporeans than older Singaporeans, and that (ii) older Singaporeans have more trouble accurately distinguishing between the DRESS and TRAP vowels when played a DRESS vowel, but can accurately identify a TRAP vowel. It also seems that Singaporeans are able to more accurately distinguish the DRESS-TRAP vowels if the speaker is non-Chinese. I hypothesise that this may be a sign of endonormative stabilisation in SgE, and that this corroborates newer sociophonetic studies on SgE by Starr (forthcoming).