to be rather small for many speakers. In the 2006 study, most white participants in only these American cities still resisted the merger: Wilmington, North Carolina; Mobile, Alabama; and Portland, Maine. A 2013 study of Portland, however, found the merger to have been established "at all age levels." In the 2006 study, even St. Louis, Missouri, which traditionally maintained the horse–hoarse distinction so strongly that it instead merged card and cord, showed that only 50% of the participants still maintained the distinction. The same pattern (a horse–hoarse distinction and a card–cord merger) also exists in a minority of speakers in Texas and Utah. New Orleans prominently shows much variability regarding the merger, including some speakers with no merger at all. Black Americans are rapidly undergoing the merger but are also less likely to do so than white Americans, with a little over half of the 2006 study's black participants maintaining the merger nationwide. The two groups of words merged by the rule are called the lexical sets (including horse) and (including hoarse) by Wells (1982). Words with the FORCE vowel that are not written with an obviously long vowel are relatively more likely to occur in the following circumstances: When the vowel immediately follows a labial consonant, , as force itself. In past participles in -orn whose corresponding past tense forms are in -ore, as in torn. in vowels ending with a silent e, as in horde. derived from a word where the long vowel spelling is used merger The merger or cheer–chair merger is the merger of the Early Modern English sequences and , as well as the between them, and is found in some accents of Modern English. Many speakers in New Zealand merge them towards the vowel, but some speakers in East Anglia and South Carolina merge them towards the vowel. The merger is widespread in Caribbean English, including Jamaican English. mergers The fern–fir–fur merger is the merger of as many as five Middle English vowels into one vowel when historically followed by in the coda of a syllable. The merged vowel is in Received Pronunciation and (phonetically a syllabic approximant or ) in American, Canadian, and Irish English. As a result of the merger, the vowels in words like , , and are the same in almost all modern accents of English. The exceptions are Scottish English, in which and belong to the same phoneme and