Abstract
AbstractThis paper focuses on a phenomenon known as pre-aspiration, defined as a period of glottal friction found in the sequences of sonorants and phonetically voiceless obstruents, as inhit[hɪht],hat[hæht],hiss[hɪhs], andcash[kæhʃ]. Pre-aspiration has been reported in North American English (Clayards and Knowles 2015); however, there are no systematic studies of pre-aspiration in this part of the English-speaking world. Our study therefore considers the following main questions. 1. Is pre-aspiration present in American English and how frequent is it? 2. Does it vary by region? We also map variation related to speaking task, sex, and a range of language-internal factors. Our analyses of data from the Nationwide Speech Project Corpus (Clopper and Pisoni 2006) confirm that pre-aspiration is a feature of American English, with rates of application reaching between 0–20 percent, depending on the region and the task. Furthermore, the more formal the task, the higher the rate of pre-aspiration application.
Highlights
Pre-aspiration is a period of glottal friction found in sequences of sonorants and phonetically voiceless obstruents, such that the words puppy, shit, and lesson, when pronounced with pre-aspiration, would be transcribed as [phʌhphɪ], [ʃɪht], and [ɫɛhsən]
This study analyzed the frequency of occurrence of pre-aspiration in American English (AmE) with the use of the Nationwide Speech Project corpus (Clopper and Pisoni 2006)
Fitting a model to a dataset with all such “stopwords” removed (using the stopwords R package (Benoit et al 2020)) gives largely unchanged results for most predictors, with the effect of lexical frequency going in the same direction, but being somewhat smaller (b = −0.29, p = 0.046)
Summary
1.1 Pre-aspiration as an areal phenomenonPre-aspiration is a period of (most typically) glottal friction found in sequences of sonorants and phonetically voiceless obstruents, such that the words puppy, shit, and lesson, when pronounced with pre-aspiration, would be transcribed as [phʌhphɪ], [ʃɪht], and [ɫɛhsən]. Docherty and Foulkes (1999) were the ones to first explicitly study the phenomenon in English. Pre-aspiration has been reported in fortis obstruents in an increasing number of varieties of English found in the UK. – RQ 1: How frequent is pre-aspiration in American English? – RQ 2: Is American English pre-aspiration restricted to specific regions?. A study of pre-aspiration in American English offers tackling two other, broader questions. The first is related to the comparability of pre-aspiration studies (Section 1.2) and the second to the cross-linguistic constraints on preaspiration (Section 1.3). We turn to a discussion of these broader aspects of pre-aspiration in what follows
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