FAKING IT: A PHONETIC ANALYSIS OF PERFORMED VOWELS

This study examines three phonemes /ae/, /ɑ/, and /ɔ/ as performed in a dialect instruction tape for actors and compares them to a natives speaking group from a study done by Hawkins and Midgley 2005. Weinreich 1968 argues that when two language groups are similar, learners gloss over close similarities. Based on this, I hypothesize that /ɑ/ will be least on target as it represents a small shift, while /ae/ and /ɔ/ will be faithful representations. The near-opposite proved true, with all of the performed vowels patterning as a statistically di'erent group than the native speaking data. Based on the results of this study, I discuss performance in context of conscious and unconscious speech and the control a human has over his ability to achieve a new phoneme in a scenario where hypercorrection phenomena are quite common. I also argue that the nature of the performer-audience relationship has an impact on the performance, both in terms of the goals of performance and the abilities of the performer. i