The overall shape of James H.'s vowel space, shown in
Figure ![[*]](icons/crossref.png){kind=icon}
, is unlike that of any other speaker studied so
far. It appears as if the bottom of the vowel triangle was cut off,
so that very little remains in the low corner. The entire top edge of
the vowel space is very sparsely populated, unlike Chicano and
Chicago, where the top edge of vowel space is the most dense part of
the entire distribution. Unlike the other dialects, there is no gap
in the high-central area relative to the high-front and high-back
regions. The filled gap may be due to the fronting of /u:, u/. The
generalization that there is always a gap in the high-central region
of vowel space appears to be incorrect. Instead, it appears that
phonetic vowel systems may or may not make use of that region of vowel
space.