Palatalization of /d/ across word boundaries in UK English

Abstract

In many spoken varieties of English, the coronal stop /d/ may palatalize or affricate before /j/, including at word boundaries; e.g., “did you” [ˈdɪdʒu], “would you” [ˈwʊdʒu]. We study this process in the large, naturalistic Audio BNC (http://www.phon.ox.ac.uk/AudioBNC). Previous studies have found that coronal fricatives /s, z/ palatalize preceding /j/ in predictable contexts and at increased speech rates, implying that palatalization results from coarticulatory gestural overlap. However, analysis of /t/ shows that palatalization to [tʃ] is a categorical stylistic variant, which is instead selected in formal contexts at slower speech rates. To determine whether [dʒ] results from gestural overlap or as a stylistic variant, we analyze /d/’s rate of palatalization using approximately 8000 tokens of /d#j/ gathered from the force-aligned Audio BNC. Tokens were impressionistically coded as palatalized to [dʒ], released as [d], or unreleased/deleted. With multinomial logistic regressioni, we test whether effects of lexical frequency, speech rate and duration, phonological context, discourse, or speaker characteristics (e.g., region, gender) predict the realization of /d#j/ in naturalistic speech. In line with previous findings, we hypothesize that [dʒ] is more likely in frequent collocations and at high speech rates, but style-driven effects of region, formality, or gender may also predict this variant.