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Flemming and Johnson (2007) have proposed that there is a fundamental distinction between a mid central vowel [ə] and a high reduced vowel [ɨ] in that [ə] occurs in unstressed word-final position while [ɨ] occurs elsewhere. Their study was the first instrumental study on the distribution of English reduced vowels but seemed to be insufficient to generalize them, since their work focused on the two reduced vowels - [ə] and [ɨ] - using minimal-pair data such as Rosa's vs. roses. Therefore, the present study revisits their study to explore the precise nature and typology of American English reduced vowels. For this, ten native speakers of English produced five types of test materials in which the factors of phonological position, morphology, and orthography were considered. First two formant frequencies were measured and their scatterplots were drawn for analyses. The results found three reduced vowels [ə], [ɨ], and [ɪ] and showed that [ɨ] occurs in the word-internal position while [ə] occurs elsewhere. The reduced vowel [ɪ] can appear together with [ə] in the word-initial position. It was also revealed that English orthography was a significant factor but morphology was not in the typology of English reduced vowels.
