Reduction of intervocalic coronal stops in colloquial words, formal words and pseudowords in American English: A large-scale production study

Abstract

Words occurring in reduction-favoring contexts have been hypothesized to become associated with reduced sound variants, reducing more than other words even when the contexts disfavors reduction. In a controlled production study, this paper investigates both this hypothesis and its converse: that words occurring often in reduction-disfavoring contexts become associated with non-reduced sound variants, compared to pseudowords. 130 speakers of American English were recorded reading sentences. Interspersed among fillers, designed to prime either formal or colloquial style, were sentences containing intervocalic /t/ and /d/ in the flapping environment. These sentences formed triplets placing different words in the same context, e.g., “She is looking for the {butter; jitter; witter}.” Words expected to disfavor reduction were overattested in formal registers of the British National Corpus. Those expected to favor it were overattested in American movie subtitles, compared to British ones, and overattested in colloquial registers. Colloquial words exhibited significantly more flap and approximant realizations of the /t/ and /d/ than either formal words or pseudowords. Furthermore, within sound variant (flap vs. stop vs. approximant), colloquial words exhibited shorter closure durations, even with local speech rate controlled. However, pseudowords behaved like formal words, suggesting that full pronunciations are used by default, despite their vanishingly low frequency.