Aberrations in the pronounciation of center (or centre, whatever)

My phonetics professor said some people may have an [n]/[4~] distinction between words like "winner" and "winter," but, as Travis said, it would be a very subtle distinction, and is one at least I don't make. I say "winner" and "winter" exactly the same...[wIn@`].

Kirk, to me the vowel length difference is actually more noticable than the difference between [n] and [4~] itself, which is very slight, as "winner" seems to have a noticeably longer vowel in its first syllable than "winter". The only real noticable difference between those [n] and [4~] themselves to me is how quickly and "hard" they're articulated, with [n] being articulated much slower, and in a less "flapping" fashion than [4~], which is articulated quickly and in a rather sharp fashion.

Oh, really, you have a vowel-length difference there? I think vowel-length is so irrelevant and nonexistent as a phonemic distinction to my dialect that longer vowels occur in few other places than as allophones before voiced consonants, as is normal in English. I don't have vowel-length difference between "winter" and "winner," and almost never mark vowel length while transcribing, because it still confuses me, as I've learned somewhat more traditional convention in transcribing English when I don't personally make any such vowel-length distinctions.

Winter = winner
writer = rider

so many homophones these days

Kirk, for me, vowel length is not phonemic, but it's now seeming to me that the production of vowel length is more complex than I previously thought, at least in my dialect. Previously, I thought that vowel length was solely produced by closed syllables where a voiced consonant is following a vowel, with all vowels where such is not present being short. However, this doesn't seem to be quite consistent, as places where /d/ has devoiced, a long vowel is preserved, yet at other cases, places where /nt/ becomes [?] or [4~], a preceding vowel, which is nasalized, is *short*. At the same time, intervocalic /n/ seems to produce a noticably longer vowel in the preceding vowel, when compared to intervocalic /nt/, even though it shouldn't be in the coda of the syllable that the lengthened vowel is in. Part of this though may be that the /n/ may be actually ambisyllabic, which makes sense with how I articulate intervocalic /n/; such ambisyllabicness could explain the vowel lengthening here.