About my PhD project
Ask a Dane to utter, in English, my bus is late AND THEN my boss is late. To most native English listeners, those two utterances will sound nearly identical. Native speakers of Danish neutralize the difference between the two vowels in bus and boss (a difference that is particularly salient in the variety of English spoken in the south of England). Why is that? Do Danes do so because they have difficulty perceiving the difference, or are they merely unfamiliar with the oral gestures necessary to produce one or both of the vowels? Or perhaps the answer lies somewhere in between?
