5. On the Uniformity of the Low-Back-Merger Shift in the U.S. West and Beyond

VALERIE FRIDLAND is professor of linguistics in the English Department at the University of Nevada, Reno, where she also serves as director of graduate studies. As a sociolinguist, her main focus is on varieties of American English. Most of her research, in collaboration with Tyler Kendall, investigates variation in vowel production and vowel perception across the Northern, Southern, and Western regions of the United States. This work explores links between social factors and speech processing. Her teaching areas include general linguistics, sociolinguistics, syntax, and language and gender. She also has a video lecture series entitled “Language and Society” released by The Great Courses. Email: [email protected].

TYLER KENDALL is associate professor of linguistics at the University of Oregon. Much of his research investigates language variation and change in terms of region and ethnicity. In collaboration with Valerie Fridland, he is engaged in a large-scale project investigating the relationship between vowel production and vowel perception in regional varieties of U.S. English. Much of his wider work focuses on corpora in and computational approaches to sociolinguistics. Along these lines, he is the developer of several sociolinguistic tools and data sets, including the Sociolinguistic Archive and Analysis Project (SLAAP), the Vowels.R package, and the Corpus of Regional African American Language (CORAAL). Email: [email protected].