Abstract
Pretonic schwa elision in fast speech (e.g. potato -› [pt]ato, demolish -›[dm]olish) has been studied by both phonologists and phoneticians to understandhow extralinguistic factors affect surface forms. Yet, both types of studies havemajor shortcomings. Phonological analyses attributing schwa elision to acrossthe-board segmental deletion have been based on researchers’ intuitions. Phoneticaccounts proposing that elision is best characterized as gestural overlap havebeen restricted to very few sequence types. In this study, 28 different [#CəC-]sequences are examined to define appropriate acoustic criteria for ‘elision’, toestablish whether elision is a deletion process or the endpoint of a continuum ofincreasing overlap, and to discover whether elision rates vary for individualspeakers. Results suggest that the acoustic patterns for elision are consistent withan overlap account. Individual speakers differ as to whether they increase elision
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