Production and perception of the short vowels /œ/ and /ɵ/
Lena Wenner | Institute for Language and Folklore, Sweden
In Sweden, an ongoing sound change is resulting in the pronunciation of short /œ/ and short /ɵ/ becoming more
similar. This chapter examines the relationship between the two sounds in the region of Uppland, situated in Central Sweden.
It summarises the results of three tests conducted to investigate the informants’ production and perception of this sound
change as well as their attitudes towards it. By combining the results of the production test with the informants’
categorisations in the perception test, the original study showed that those informants with a small phonetic distance between
/œ/ and /ɵ/ in their own speech were better at categorising vowel stimuli correctly than the speakers who had a larger
phonetic distance.
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