Abstract
Rates of t-glottaling across word boundaries in both preconsonantal and prevocalic contexts have recently been claimed to be positively correlated with the frequency of occurrence of a given word in preconsonantal contexts (Eddington & Channer, 2010). Words typically followed by consonants have been argued to have their final /t/s glottaled more often than words less frequently followed by consonants. This paper includes a number of ‘internal’ and ‘external’ predictors in a mixed-effects logistic regression model and has two goals: (1) to replicate the positive correlation of the frequency of occurrence of a word in preconsonantal contexts (its ‘contextual frequency’) with its rates of t-glottaling in both preconsonantal and prevocalic contexts postulated by Eddington and Channer (2010), and (2) to quantify the factors influencing the likelihood of t-glottaling across word boundaries in Midland American English. The effect of contextual frequency has been confirmed. This result is argued to support a hybrid view of phonological storage and processing, one including both abstract and exemplar representations. T-glottaling has also been found to be negatively correlated with bigram frequency and speech rate deviation, while positively correlated with young age in female speakers.
Highlights
T-glottaling is the realization of the voiceless alveolar plosive /t/ as a glottal stop [ʔ]
With regard to the first goal of the paper, the replication of the contextual frequency effect, it has been confirmed that /t/-final words that typically occur before consonantinitial words undergo glottaling at higher rates than words that occur before consonantinitial words less often
As to the second goal of the paper, the quantification of the factors influencing rates of prevocalic t-glottaling across word boundaries in Midland American English, bigram frequency and speech rate deviation have been found to be negatively correlated with t-glottaling, while the results concerning the frontness of the initial vowel of the following word, and the presence or lack of stress on the initial syllable of the following word remain inconclusive
Summary
T-glottaling is the realization of the voiceless alveolar plosive /t/ as a glottal stop [ʔ]. Eddington and Channer (2010) present a large-scale study of the competition of glottaling and flapping in unscripted speech They analyzed a sub-part of the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English (DuBois et al, 2005), looking at all cases of word-final /t/ (preceded by a vowel, nasal, or liquid) followed by vowel-initial words (N = 1,101). For further analysis, including regression modeling, only cases where /t/ was realized either as a flap or glottal stop were kept (N = 5,803) This is motivated by the observation that it is these two allophones of /t/ that compete directly in word-final prevocalic position As a remedy to initial model convergence issues, the BOBYQA optimizer was used
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