pronounced differently. Mirror–nearer and mergers The mergers of and (as in mirror and nearer, or Sirius and serious, respectively) and occur in North American English as a part of pre- laxing, together with Mary–merry merger and the horse–hoarse merger in most dialects with the first two mergers. The phonetic outcome of the first merger is either a lax vowel , or a somewhat raised vowel that approaches the monophthongal allophone of : , often diphthongal as . In the case of the merger, it tends to approach the monophthongal variant of : . The mirror–nearer merger is absent from traditional, local, or non-standard accents of the Southern and Eastern United States, where nearer is pronounced with a tense monophthong or a centering diphthong (phonemicized as or , depending on whether the accent is rhotic or not), whereas mirror has a lax monophthong . In the case of the first merger, only a handful of minimal pairs (e.g. cirrus–serous and Sirius–serious) illustrate the contrast, in addition to morphologically distinct pairs (e.g.spirit–spear it), all of which are rendered homophonous by the merger. Indeed, the amount of the words containing is itself low. No minimal pairs exist for the merger, due to the extreme scarcity of the sequence in dialects of English with the foot–strut split (furthermore, the hurry–furry merger that occurs in most varieties of North American English results in a merger of with , removing almost any trace of the historical vowel in this position). Instead, it is a simple replacement of one phoneme with another, so that the word tour is perceived to contain the vowel, rather than the vowel. However, this change may not hold where morpheme boundaries apply, allowing a qualitative distinction to be maintained between the stressed vowels in tourist (a fairly close back monophthong of variable height) on the one hand and two-wrist (a fully close monophthong in free variation with a narrow closing diphthong) on the other hand (cf. traditional RP ). The same applies to the mirror–nearer merger, which laxes the vowel in clearing but not in key ring , cf. RP . Certain words are pronounced as if they contained a morpheme boundary before , notably hero and zero . Some words originally containing the sequence are merged with either (see cure–force merger) or, more rarely, (see cure–nurse merger) instead of + . The mirror–nearer and mergers are not to be confused with