Abstract
Predictability has been shown to be associated with many dimensions of variation in speech, including durational variation and variable omission of segments. However, the mechanism or mechanisms that underlie these effects are still unclear. This paper presents data on a new aspect of predictability in speech, namely how it affects allophonic variation. We examine two coronal stop allophones in English, flap and glottal stop, and find that their relationship with predictability is quite different from what is expected under current theories of probabilistic reduction in speech. Flapping is more likely when the word that follows is more predictable, but is not influenced by the frequency of the word itself, while glottal stops are more likely in words that are less predictable. We propose that the crucial distinction between these two allophones is how they are conditioned by phonological context. This, we argue, interacts with online speech planning processes and gives rise to variability for context-dependent allophones. This hypothesis offers a specific, testable mechanism for certain predictability effects, and has the potential to extend to other factors that contribute to variability in speech.
Highlights
The pronunciation of words in a sentence context can differ greatly from their citation forms
While much previous work has investigated the effect of frequency and predictability on deletion of word-final coronal stops (Guy, 2007; Jurafsky et al, 2001; Raymond et al, 2016; Tanner et al, 2017), as far as we are aware this is the first time such results have been reported for glottalization, and only the second for flapping
Our results show that predictability has an influence on the realization of word-final coronal stops that goes beyond straightforward reduction of predictable material
Summary
The pronunciation of words in a sentence context can differ greatly from their citation forms. The sound sequences created by adjacent words may require phonological or phonetic adjustments, as is the case in many types of connected speech processes across a number of languages (Kaisse, 1985). How do phonological context and contextual predictability come together to influence the distribution of pronunciation variants in running speech? This paper contributes to our understanding of this question by presenting an empirical study of word-final coronal stop realizations in English, and elaborating our hypothesis about the relationship between predictability and the selection of phonologically conditioned pronunciation variants. Phonologically-conditioned variation The realization of coronal stops in American English, which we focus on in this paper, can be quite accurately predicted from syllabic position and identity of adjacent segments (Kahn, 1976; Randolph, 1989).
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Schedule a callMore From: Laboratory Phonology: Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology
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