Region, gender, and within-category variation in American English voiced stops

Abstract

The two-way voicing contrast in American English stops—particularly in initial position—is often described as a long-lag (e.g., long positive VOT for /p/) versus short-lag (e.g., short positive VOT for /b/) distinction, with less frequent instances of lead voicing (e.g., negative VOT for /b/) attributed to individual variation. Systematic within-category gender and region differences have been reported, however, with more closure voicing found for male than for female speakers (Ryalls, Zipprer, and Baldauff, 1997), and more fully voiced closures for /b/ in female speakers from North Carolina than those from Wisconsin (Jacewicz, Fox, and Lyle, 2009). With this in mind, we investigate the interaction of gender and region in the prevoicing of word-initial voiced stops by comparing the VOTs of male and female speakers from Indiana and Mississippi. Participants were recorded reading three repetitions of a pseudo-randomized list of words including bot, dot, and got. Regional—but no gender—differences were found: speakers from Mississippi produced stops with negative VOT more often (~35% of the time) than speakers from Indiana (~15%), suggesting that southern varieties of English are indeed more heavily prevoiced than other varieties of English.