I reread the whole page and edited things that I thought were unclear or not quite right. Some of the major changes:
(Previously it just started with the table of contents and the first section.)
This is a description of certain features about how I talk, focusing on pronunciation (partly because that's what I have more to say about, and partly because it was initially inspired by a forum thread that focused on pronunciation.
Most of this is from my intuitions about how I talk, and trying to say things out loud; there may be cases where I think I say things a different way than I actually do, or say things differently when I'm thinking about pronunciation vs. normal speech, and I haven't done much to correct for that. (On the other hand, this means there's information here about whether I think of one sound as being the same as another, which one couldn't get from just hearing me talk.)
When I read or think, I usually imagine the sounds of words, which means that I have pronunciations that I use in my head of any word that I read or think (including words that I haven't had reason to say out loud). In some cases, I'm not actually sure if I'd use the same pronunciation if I were actually speaking out loud (particularly in cases where a word has a sound or combination of sounds that otherwise doesn't usually occur in my dialect, or in cases where I know that the pronunciation I use is nonstandard).
Except when otherwise specified, I'm generally talking about whether I pronounce one sound the same as I pronounce another sound, rather than what exactly the sound is. This means, for instance, when I write /aɪ/, that means the "price" vowel, and I haven't determined specifically that it's [aɪ] and not [ai] or [ɑɪ] or something like that (I'm usually just using the notation I'm familiar with). I'm also not always sure where the syllable breaks should go (whether consonants are part of the syllable with the previous vowel or the one with the next vowel), but the number of syllables is pretty much always meaningful.
(Some of the stuff here is moved from other sections.)
My initial inclination would be to say that schwa/the COMMA vowel /ə/ is the same vowel as STRUT /ʌ/ (e.g. when I was younger, phonetic alphabets that I made used the same letter for both sounds), though also some schwas seem more like the KIT vowel /ɪ/ (especially the ones in the -es and -ed suffixes). I'm not sure I consistently make a distinction, though; around when I first realized this, I noticed some words seemed ambiguous.
I do distinguish a more /ʌ/-like sound and a more /ɪ/-like sound at the ends of words before the plural or past tense suffix, so Rosa's /ˈɹoʊ.zʌz/, roses /ˈɹoʊ.zɪz/, and Rosie's /ˈɹoʊ.ziz/ are all distinct, at least if I'm speaking carefully. Schwa at the ends of words sounds like /ʌ/ (STRUT vowel).
(I don't know for sure if this is true, but I kind of suspect maybe there's an unweakening of /ə/ to /ʌ/ at the ends of words (or utterances?), and maybe the beginnings, like was proposed in the comments here; in that case, perhaps the inclination that /ə/ = /ʌ/ comes from the fact that typical example words for /ə/ are words that have it in positions where it's pronounced /ʌ/ instead.)
When stressed, from, what, was, of, because (but not the noun or verb cause), -body (in somebody etc., but not body by itself), want, and hover have /ʌ/ (STRUT vowel) in my idiolect. Got has /ɑ/. An and and have /æ/ (TRAP vowel; stressed an and the name Ann are homophones for me), and the article a is /ʌ/ or /eɪ/ (FACE vowel, like the letter). I'd probably pronounce wont as /ˈwɑnt/, but I never use that word and it might be a spelling pronunciation.
Added:
Suffixes:
In words I used to pronounce certain ways:
There are also some words that I first saw written down, and the pronunciation I used in my head was different from what I later heard other people say. (A lot of the ones I can think of relate to computers/programming, and I think a lot of these I haven't said out loud.)
I'm sure there are plenty of other words like that.
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Clarified the note on sunglasses: I basically never wear sunglasses. I currently don't own a pair; it's possible there was a time when I was super young when I wore sunglasses (I can't remember), but I don't anymore. (The only exception is at the dentist, where they give me sunglasses to block out the big light they shine on my teeth, which is apparently a thing some dentists do and others don't.)
I think I can recognize people's faces, but I might not be the best at it? Whatever it is I'm doing seems to be automatic, and I can't tell what exact features my brain is paying attention to. I can get thrown off if someone changes their hairstyle or clothing style or stops wearing glasses (though I think I can usually recognize them again; hair is probably worse than clothing).
I can sometimes have problems recognizing people I haven't seen in a long time. Part of that might be that someone I haven't seen might have changed appearance (either the previously-mentioned clothing or hair, or in some cases they grew up or gained/lost a lot of weight or something like that). At one point I noticed there seemed to be a time around the end of middle school/beginning of high school where if the last time I've seen someone is before this time, I'm unlikely to recognize them, which might have something to do with the fact that anyone from that period of my life either used to be bigger than me but now isn't, or used to be a child but now isn't; or maybe something changed about how I recognize people around that time. (However, I haven't seen enough people from high school recently to know if I'd recognize them now, so I don't know if this is an amount-of-time thing or a before-a-certain-age thing.)
A couple other things that can get in the way of facial recognition:
Also, I'm not sure if this is still true, but at some point in my life I noticed that I frequently can't remember someone's hair color if they have certain hair colors (in particular, I think brown and black are the same to me in my memory, even though I could tell them apart if I were actually looking at them). I hardly ever remember eye color, unless I specifically payed attention to it.
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