Prevocalic t-glottaling across word boundaries in Midland American English

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.

Keywords

• contextual frequency
• t-glottaling
• Midland American English