restricted to compound words) because of the derived forms such as warring (compare the wholly-holy split, which results in creation of a separate phoneme before coda ). However, the change did not affect all derived forms, such as warrior . The distinction between intervocalic and , both of which are distinct from as in starry, is stable and affects also Australian English, New Zealand English, and South African English and most regional British English varieties. In Scottish English, which merges cot with caught, moral, war, and warring belong to the class (– + ): (as does warrior ), but oral, bore and boring feature (which is + ): . The same applies to the conservative General American varieties that preserve the – distinction. Some regional non-rhotic British English retains the – distinction (with being distinct from + prevocalic , as in Received Pronunciation), as is the case in, for example, South Wales (excluding Cardiff) and some West Midlands English. is typically the same as , and varies. The areas of Wales that make the distinction merge it with the monophthongal variety of : (those accents lack the toe–tow merger), but in the West Midlands, it corresponds to + : or a separate phoneme: . The words belonging to each set vary to an extent region to region, and speakers from Port Talbot tend to use , instead of the etymologically correct , in forceps, fortress, important and importance. The Cockney English distinction between and is not related to the – distinction, which does not exist in that dialect. Instead, the split gives rise to the phonemic distinction between and in the preconsonantal position, as in board and bored as well as pause and paws . In the United States, the merger is widespread everywhere but is quite recent in some parts of the country. For example, fieldwork performed in the 1930s by Kurath and McDavid shows the contrast to be robustly present in the speech of Vermont, northern and western New York State, Virginia, central and southern West Virginia, and North Carolina as well as the whole Atlantic coast (North and South),. However, by the 1990s, telephone surveys conducted by Labov, Ash, and Boberg (2006) show those areas as having completely or almost completely undergone the merger. Even in areas in which the distinction is still made, the acoustic difference between the of horse and the of hoarse was found