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sounding country or non-standard have Southern Vowel Shift features while speakers who self-describe as sounding white,standard, or distance themselves from non-standard speech show no evidence of Southern Shifting. Speakers who do not selfcategorizeshow variable patterns. These data indicate that speakers self-categorize regionality and ethnicity based in part onvowel patterns.Mary Kohn (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) Session 21Charlie Farrington (University of Oregon)The shifty vowels of African American English youth: a longitudinal studyThis study investigates high back vowel fronting and the raising of the BAT vowel class for 20 African Americans fromPiedmont, North Carolina at three time points. The first variable represents a change in progress for the AAE speaker community,but one that is advanced for the Predominant Regional Variety. The second feature represents a stable salient ethnic variable(Thomas et al. 2010). Results indicate that unlike morphosyntactic change (Van Hofwegen & Wolfram 2010), vowel change isselective within the population. These findings support the hypothesis that linguistic innovators are important in advancing soundchange during adolescence (Labov 2001).Cesar Koirala (University of Delaware) Session 47Incorporating syllables into feature-based distributions describing phonotactic patternsThe current work shows how to use distributions of onsets and codas to integrate syllables into a feature-based model ofphonotactic learning – Heinz & Koirala (2010). It is illustrated that incorporation of syllabification provides important contextualinformation to the learning model. It allows the model to find different probability distributions for the same consonant cluster atdifferent syllable positions with far fewer parameters than a bigram model which uses different symbols for segments in onset andcoda positions.Chisato Kojima (Indiana University) Session 17Lexical encoding of geminate consonants by advanced learners of JapaneseThe geminate/non-geminate contrast in Japanese (e.g. katta ‘bought’ vs. kata ‘shoulder’) is difficult to acquire when absent fromthe learners’ first language (L1) (Han, 1992). Even though second language learners could distinguish the contrast (Hardison andMotohashi-Saigo, 2010), that discrimination ability does not mean that second language learners have encoded the distinction inL2 lexical representations. We examined the degree to which the geminate / non-geminate contrast is merged or separated inadvanced learners’ L2 lexical representations with a lexical decision task. Results indicate that learners’ lexical encoding for L2words builds on L1 phonological representations.Chris Koops (University of New Mexico) Session 21Southern /æ/-raising and the drawl: a question of timingHow is the variable raising of the vowel /æ/ in Southern Anglo American English related to the triphthongization (“drawling”) ofthe same vowel in this dialect, e.g. [æɪə]? This analysis is based on recordings of Anglos from Houston, Texas who show /æ/-raising to [ɛə]~[eə]. A close acoustic analysis reveals one crucial additional detail. In the most SVS-shifted speakers, the raisedinitial target is reached only after a brief temporal delay and is preceded by a brief [æ]-like quality, e.g. [ æ eə]. This may lead to anew initial target [æ], which helps connect the Southern Vowel Shift to the Southern “drawl”.Sachie Kotani (Tezukayama University/University of British Columbia) Session 34Japanese predicate cleft constructions as a morphological reduplicationThis paper investigates Japanese Predicate Cleft Constructions (JPCCs), as shown in (1).(1) Ben-wa (kinoo) jisyo-o kau/kat-ta koto-WABen-Top(ic) yesterday dictionary-Acc buy/buy-Past Nominalizer(Nml)-CTop(*kinoo) kat-ta.yesterdaybuy-Past‘Ben indeed bought a dictionary (yesterday). (But he returned it back.)’170