The /el/-/æl/ Sound Change in Australian English: A Preliminary Perception Experiment

The /el/-/æl/ sound change in Australian English involves the loss of contrast between prelateral /e/ and /æ/ for some speakers, so that both vowels are realised as [æ]. In Australia, this sound change is popularly and frequently identified as being typical of only speakers from Melbourne and Victoria. However, aside from a small number of production studies, very little research has been carried out into the phenomenon. In this paper, we report on three preliminary perception experiments to determine how Australian English listeners respond to /el/ and /æl/ tokens. Listeners were 386 highschool students and their teachers, with 89% classified as Victorian listeners (from Melbourne and Victoria) and 11% non-Victorian (from elsewhere in Australia). Across all experiments, Victorian listeners consistently performed worse than non-Victorian listeners when presented with /el/-/æl/ stimuli, and also reported more difficulty with all tasks. As well as discussing patterns in listener responses, we address reasons that the /el/-/æl/ sound change may be regionally defined. We conclude with a discussion of how this preliminary perceptual investigation, along with previous production work, accords with Ohala’s (1993) model of why sound changes occur.