The CURE lexical set refers to words such as cure, sure, endure, and tour. With Bill Haddican and his lab, I am investigating mergers of the CURE set, meaning that the CURE words start to be pronounced with a different vowel sound. While the merger of CURE with FORCE (the set containing words such as force, four, and hoarse) has been documented since at least the 1960s, we have found other processes of merger. For some speakers, the CURE words become disyllabic, so that they rhyme with doer or skewer. For others, a subset of CURE words merge with NURSE, so that surely becomes synonymous with Shirley. Finally, some speakers display multiple patterns of merger. While these tour-doer and surely-Shirley mergers have been observed before, to our knowledge, ours is the first detailed investigation of these mergers.
Yod (the "y" sound, /j/) has a very restricted distribution in English: when it appears in C_V sequences (that is, between a consonant and a vowel), it places sharp restrictions on what consonant and vowel are allowed. In most dialects, it only appears before the GOOSE vowel (as in cute) and CURE (as in cure). Moreover, in most English dialects, it cannot follow a "liquid" consonant like /l/ or /ɹ/, so most speakers don't pronounce a "y" sound in lewd or rude. Additionally, for many North American English speakers, it cannot follow a coronal consonant like /t/ or /n/, so it's rare to hear a "y" sound in tune or suit. Because of this patterning, it is ambiguous whether yod is part of the syllable onset (the consonant(s) at the beginning of the syllable) or nucleus (the vowel), and prior research has found variability in where speakers put yod. With Bill Haddican and his lab, I am investigating whether the position of yod is changing in American English.